Smart Manufacturing Trends: Four Years, One Stuck Number
I have read four editions of the Rockwell State of Smart Manufacturing Report back to back, and I keep coming back to the same number. In 2024, manufacturers said only 44% of the data they collected got used well. Two years later, in a report branded the “execution era”, that figure sits at 43%. Almost nothing else stayed still. Generative AI arrived and then got rebranded as agentic AI. Cyber risk climbed the obstacle list. AI moved from pilot lines to production at scale. The one number that should have moved if any of that mattered, the share of data actually changing a decision, barely shifted. That is the story most coverage of this report misses. Everyone covers the new headline. Almost nobody asks why the same constraint keeps showing up underneath it, year after year, regardless of which technology is fashionable. I think that question is more useful to a COO than this year’s headline will ever be, and this piece is my case for why. The Reality You do not get the luxury of treating each year’s report as a fresh start. The pressures arrive on top of each other, not in sequence. One quarter it is energy
