Input Stories

Artificial intelligence is crucial to modern manufacturing, and federal policies governing it should take a light-touch approach to ensure future success, the NAM said last week.

What’s going on: “Manufacturers are applying AI in myriad ways, both within their operations and in their products,” the NAM told the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in response to a request for information on a National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing.

• Some 51% of manufacturers already use AI, 60% expect to use it by 2027 and 80% said that by 2030, AI will be vital to expand or maintain their business, according to a 2025 survey from the Manufacturing Leadership Council, the NAM’s digital transformation arm.
• The OSTP revises the plan every four years with public input.

Why it’s important: AI enables manufacturers to vastly improve their operations, in turn increasing output quality, worker safety, operational cost effectiveness and sustainability, the NAM said.
 
Some of what ails us: Current obstacles to ensuring greater adoption and deployment of AI in manufacturing include:

• “[S]ignificant limitations to the Section 41 R&D [tax] credit”;
• Attempts by the IRS to deny the “factory-based research expenditures”; and
• A lack of guidance from the IRS on the treatment of AI by the R&D tax credit.

What should be done: Manufacturers benefited significantly from the 2025 tax reforms. To amplify that success, the administration should:

• Identify regulations enacted before the advent of AI, which might prevent manufacturers from developing AI-enabled goods or deploying AI in their operations;
• Ensure that it does not make “any policy or regulatory approach to AI that is one-size-fits-all”; and
• “[R]ight-size any eventual compliance burden associated with regulations that apply to the use of AI.”

The NAM also asked federal agencies to “streamline application and reporting processes.”

The last word: “AI is the area of emerging science and technology with the greatest impact on the international competitiveness of, and the greatest transformative effect on, the manufacturing industry,” said NAM Senior Director of Technology Policy Franck Journoud and NAM Vice President of Domestic Policy Jake Kuhns.

NAM advocacy: Manufacturers have been leading the development and deployment of AI on shop floors—and the NAM is driving the policy to match—from backing the White House’s AI legislative framework and AI Action Plan to its influential policy roadmap for AI and energy dominance and broader advocacy.