Podcast: Crystal Ball series shows all the advancements in store for 2025—and more

Scott Achelpohl: Welcome to this first episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast of 2025 from Smart Industry, and I’m Scott Achelpohl, SI’s managing editor.

I saw on Tik Tok that you’re not supposed to say Happy New Year after Jan. 15, but Happy New Year regardless! We’re happy you’re listening in, and we’ve got a great podcast for you.

Podcast: Insights from our team of editors on how 2024 transformed manufacturing (Part 1)

Podcast: Insights from our team of editors on how 2024 transformed manufacturing (Part 2)

Today, I wanted to take a few minutes to tout our best work of the new year so far, Smart Industry’s Crystal Ball series, which ran on our site from mid-December all the way until mid-January. So, as January concludes I wanted to go over some of the highlights of the series—and remind you that this podcast will be curated on our website and that we’ll have links to every story in the series for you to check out.

As you might imagine, AI was a huge talking point among our Crystal Ball thought leaders, starting with Aaron Merkin and Jason Waxman’s piece on Dec. 16 where they argued that AI this year could begin make all the difference in capturing and utilizing knowledge that is being lost as manufacturing sheds more of its skilled workforce through retirements and attrition.

In the series, we heard a lot about how AI will impact cybersecurity, and Chris Scheels of Gurucul predicted that organizations will increasingly turn to AI to power their improved security postures. He said that, as AI models continue to evolve, they will be able to identify sophisticated attacks that traditional methods of detection might miss.

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More generally, David Parry-Jones of DeepL wrote that increased awareness of AI in the public consciousness has been a huge accelerant for enterprise adoption

Smart Industry is going to focus a lot this year not on why AI is this shiny new thing—that was so 2024—but on what AI can do.

Just after the Crystal Ball series concluded, Raj Badarinath of Rootstock Software wrote for us (sorry, Raj, if I’m mispronouncing your name) about Rootstock’s State of AI in Manufacturing Survey and how it showed that, yes, 90% of manufacturers say AI is important to the future of industry and, also, that 77% have implemented some form of AI but more interestingly that apprehension might be leading them so far to lean toward AI copilots supervised by humans over autonomous agents that operate without human oversight.

That tells us there’s tons of enthusiasm about AI, that this tech is here to stay, but that trust is still low. Only 22% of those surveyed by Rootstock and vendor Researchscape say they’ve opted for agents, as opposed to 53% of adopters who prefer copilots. Interesting stuff.

I mentioned cybersecurity, and in addition to AI, we’ll focus a lot this year on systems and plant floor software security, and Aron Brand of CTERA Networks described for us how resilient manufacturing will rise in 2025 because, as IT and OT continue to converge, opportunity and risk will come to the industrial landscape and that manufacturers must evolve their cybersecurity strategies because adversaries continue to make their methods more sophisticated.

See also: Six ways to incorporate AI into your manufacturing operations

Cybersecurity compliance—meaning following government rules and standards and reporting requirements like those imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S.—also is an important consideration and will be a whole-company challenge, not just one for the IT team, Joe Anderson of TechSolve wrote for us as part of the Crystal Ball series.

Our Great Question podcast hosted Joe in October to chat about the importance of a vigorous password policies and practices. Joe possesses numerous cybersecurity certifications such as CISSP, PNPT, CompTIA Security+, C|EH, ECSA, CMMC-RP, and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer: Security, and more. Joe is an important voice for us, and he had a siren call in the Crystal Ball series that cybersecurity has to be a companywide focus for it to succeed.

Patrick Spencer of Kiteworks looks into trends that will reshape private content security, and that the focus in the new year will be building what Patrick calls “adaptive security architectures.” Does this include using AI? He says absolutely, because AI is bound to be used by advisories, the threat actors that will wield sophisticated AI-powered attacks.

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You might have thought the Crystal Ball series delved into only AI and cybersecurity. Important topics to be sure, we talked about so much more during the series:

The overall mix of uncertainty and opportunity that 2025 is bound to bring, with an all-Republican U.S. government bent on erasing the Biden years and the unknowns of the tariff economy and workforce change (as Ethan Karp of MAGNET details).

The outlook in the power and utility sector preoccupied Sally Jacquemin of Aspen Technology in the Crystal Ball series, particularly the work the sector must do this year to bolster cybersecurity in decentralized grids in a year that, she says, also will see utility control rooms evolve toward relying on network-driven software solutions and AI (there’s AI popping up again) solutions.

All in all, it was a fun and informative series to put together, and I think all 30-some contributors, a diverse group of thought leaders who made the Crystal Ball Report possible for 2025.

From Smart Industry, thank you for listening today to this latest episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast. I’m Scott Achelpohl, wishing you a pleasant rest of your day!