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Artificial intelligence isn’t affecting all of manufacturing in a single way, NAM Chief Operating Officer Todd Boppell said during a panel talk at last week’s 2026 CES in Las Vegas.
 
What’s going on: “[E]very manufacturer has a business operation to run,” Boppell told Traci Gusher, partner at Americas AI, data leader at EY and the moderator of last Wednesday’s CES panel, “Powering Manufacturing Transformation with AI Partnerships,” presented by EY.

• “That includes everything from accounting systems, to CRM systems, to whatever those systems might be. … AI is affecting those systems very much the way it would be affecting a bank or an insurance company or a hospital or anybody else.”
• In research and development and product development and innovation, however, generative AI, such as ChatGPT, is being used for “things like sensing public sentiment, trying to figure out what’s happening in the public space by mining social media … but also … within their own companies to mine all of their scientific knowledge that they may have built over many, many decades [and] help their new scientists get up to speed much quicker than they used to be able to.”
• On the factory floor, Boppell said, machine learning “has been doing a lot of work … for a long time”—so the explosion in recent years in the use of generative AI hasn’t had as much of an impact.

The promise: That’s not to say that generative AI won’t change factory floor processes for manufacturers, Boppell continued. Quite the opposite.

• “[A]s we look into the very near future, agentic AI and physical AI,” he said, referring to AI systems that act in the real world in addition to “thinking” and generating, “have a lot of promise, I think, in manufacturing operations. We’re starting to hear a lot of emerging use cases about how those might be mined and deployed to make manufacturing that much more efficient or more rapid and safer.”

Human–AI interaction: One of the questions manufacturers will need to answer in the coming years is “What is the relationship between human workers and AI?” Boppell said.

• The Manufacturing Institute, the NAM’s 501(c)3 workforce development and education affiliate, “is starting to do some work in this area, especially around ‘How do people on factory floors … interact with AI, [and] what skills do they need? Not only that, but what devices do they need?’” he said.
• “Some of those folks are not using keyboards or laptops or any sort of a workstation. Some of them don’t currently have email addresses in the company email system because they’re production workers and that’s not part of what they need to do. … [H]ow are they going to interact with whatever the AI is that they’re going to be using” in the future?

What’s next? AI is likely to take on one of manufacturing’s biggest headaches in the near future, according to Boppell.

• “Gen AI [could] take over data governance and data management and start to create whole new ways to achieve value out of these giant data lakes that manufacturing operations have been creating,” he said.
• “[T]hat’s a way that manufacturing ops are going to start to see real value from AI. … You’re trying to get AI to sift through this enormous amount of data and give you insights and give you threads from it that you wouldn’t normally see and help you correlate things that you wouldn’t normally correlate.”

The last word: As the panelists gave their thoughts on the future of AI, Gusher summed up the opportunity it offers: “AI [is] an opportunity to reimagine versus just adapt [and will allow organizations to] get from just incremental value to really exponential value.”

In related news … Manufacturing Leadership Council Content Director Jeff Puma moderated the CES 2026 panel “Beyond AI: The Technologies Powering the Future of Manufacturing” last Wednesday, which included panelists Michelangelo Canzoneri, global head of group smart manufacturing at EMD Electronics; Adam Cooper, principal at EY; Catherine Kniker, chief marketing and sustainability officer at PTC; and Jon Van Wyck, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at 3M.