Most manufacturers didn’t need a business case to understand the cost of reactive maintenance. They’d been absorbing it for years – unplanned stops, recovery overtime, expedited parts, the slow erosion of scheduling confidence and customer trust. What shifted was the available answer. AI in maintenance moved from speculative to deployable fast enough that the investment case made itself.
Industry commitment is real, but something isn’t converting at the rate anyone projected. Our recent research found that approximately 78% of all reported barriers to progress are workforce-related. Access to AI moved faster than the ability to use it consistently. That gap is now the constraint.
The first wave proved the tools, not the model
Manufacturers are investing in AI to improve productivity, yet many are still carrying the behaviors that predictive maintenance was meant to reduce.
The research shows predictive maintenance adoption has more than doubled year over year, while reactive maintenance remained flat. Proactive maintenance has also lost ground year over year. That combination is the point: new methods are entering the plant, but they’re not fully replacing the old ones.
This shouldn’t be read as failure. Plants moved for practical reasons, and early pilots gave teams useful proof. A model can work well on a known asset with a focused team around it. The harder test comes when that model has to support decisions across shifts, sites, and mixed levels of experience.
That’s where the first wave exposed the next problem. Technology can move quickly into the budget. Work habits, trust, decision rights, and frontline confidence take longer to change.
AI investment grows up
The budget data confirms that leaders aren’t walking away from AI; they’re becoming more selective about where it has to prove itself. Investment is moving away from exploratory AI and toward operational priorities, including cybersecurity, data management, Generative AI and Industrial AI.
That shift reflects a more practical view of digital maturity. Leaders are trying to make AI work where the cost of delay, downtime, and poor data shows up quickly.
It also reframes expectations around Industry 5.0. As industrial technology moves from Industry 4.0’s automation-led model toward a more human-in-the-loop approach, leaders appear to be recalibrating the timeline, with 40% now expecting a one- to four-year journey.
Where the model stops and the supervisor starts
It’s easy to misread the 78% workforce-barrier figure as a labor shortage story – headcount, hiring, pipeline. However, the truth of the matter is that businesses are facing a lack of expertise, knowledge shortages, skilled labor gaps, and broader workforce capability deficits. Taken together, those four categories describe something harder to fix than a recruitment problem. They describe an organization’s capacity to absorb a different way of working.
It’s a pattern I hear consistently from customers: the tools are in place, but the teams around them are still catching up. Researchers Cohen and Levinthal gave that capacity a name: absorptive capacity.
In plain English, it’s how quickly a business can recognize useful new knowledge, absorb it into the organization and convert it into practical output. In a maintenance context, that output is a decision made under real operating conditions – by a night-shift supervisor weighing whether a current anomaly justifies an intervention, whether it can wait until the next planned stop, or whether the risk has already crossed a line. A model can flag the anomaly. It can’t make that call.
What predictive maintenance and AI actually demand from the workforce is harder to train than tool proficiency. The UK Government’s AI Skills for the UK Workforce report identifies the gap in concrete terms for advanced manufacturing.
Beyond technical application skills like training AI models or integrating real-time analytics, the report points to the ability to interpret AI outputs, adapt workflows around new insights, and communicate changes to frontline teams. These are key competencies that determine whether an alert changes behavior or gets dismissed.
That’s why the workforce issue can’t sit beside the technology program as a separate HR workstream. It’s part of the system that decides whether investment turns into better execution. Industry 5.0’s timetable will be set by capability on the plant floor.
Investing for predictive, paying for reactive
The commercial consequence is visible in the lag between spending and return. Predictive adoption is rising, more capital is being allocated, yet the reactive baseline hasn’t moved. Many plants are running two modes of operation at once – investing for data-driven execution while still losing time to avoidable firefighting.
That split has a cost. Siemens’ 2024 True Cost of Downtime research puts unplanned downtime losses for the world’s 500 biggest companies at $1.4 trillion annually – 11% of their total revenues. That figure reflects what happens when the shift from reactive to predictive is incomplete. The investment is there, but the daily execution hasn’t fully followed.
When that gap persists, ROI on technology spend arrives slowly and unevenly. Timelines extend. Confidence in delivery weakens.
Where the return is earned
The discipline being applied to tools and platforms now needs to apply to the people and routines around them. For many organizations, that’s where the return is being left on the table.
Leaders should start with the parts of the operation where capability is most fragile. Which assets still depend on one or two experienced technicians to interpret what’s happening? Which work histories are too thin to support the next diagnosis? Which alerts trigger confident action, and which sit in limbo until the right person is on shift?
Those questions reveal whether predictive maintenance has become part of execution or whether it’s still sitting on top of reactive habits.
Capture the know-how that still lives in people’s heads before it walks out the door. Make work histories complete enough to help the next technician. Train operators and maintenance teams to understand what a predictive alert is telling them, what evidence warrants action and when to escalate. Shape workflows so acting on insight becomes the normal path, not a special effort.
Connected reliability supports that execution when it stays close to the work – connecting asset data, maintenance history and frontline judgment so teams can make repeatable decisions across shifts and sites.
Our research backs this up: nearly half of respondents plan to advance connected reliability initiatives within the next 12 months, treating reliability as the practical bridge between near-term operational needs and longer-term ambitions.
The call for manufacturing leaders is straightforward: audit capability with the same seriousness as technology spend. Don’t stop at asking what AI has been deployed. Ask who can act on it, where decisions slow down, what knowledge is undocumented and which workflows still pull teams back into reactive work.
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