Robots Won’t Replace Manufacturing Workers. They’ll Save the Worker Skills We’re About to Lose.

As experienced manufacturing workers approach retirement, businesses across Chicago's Southland face a growing challenge. How to preserve decades of specialized knowledge while remaining competitive in an increasingly automated economy.

Southland Development Authority (SDA) CEO Bo Kemp argues that robotics and artificial intelligence may be essential to the survival of American manufacturing. And not because they replace workers. There’s more to it than that.

Drawing on the SDA's experience developing the Metals HUB, Kemp explores why the region's manufacturing future depends on modernizing equipment, increasing productivity, developing new talent, and preserving businesses. The same ones that generations of workers helped build.

The following essay was originally published on Bo Kemp's Substack.

Robots Won’t Replace Manufacturing Workers. They’ll Save the Worker Skills We’re About to Lose.

Inside the Midwest Metals HUB — a model for how legacy manufacturing regions can modernize before the labor shortage catches up with them.

This essay is adapted from my op-ed column in the Winter 2024 issue of The Robot Report, “Chicago’s South Suburbs see the future of manufacturing as American and robotic”

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about what happens to a manufacturing region after the factories that built it start to close. For decades, Chicagoland was one of the great engines of American manufacturing. Then came economic stagnation, outmigration, a declining tax base — and an aging workforce nobody had a real plan to replace.

What I have come to believe is that robotics and AI are not a threat to what is left of that manufacturing base in the way that many believe. They just may be the only realistic way to save it.

Most people assume automation and jobs are in conflict — that robots take work away from people. And for many white collar and entry level jobs, this is likely to be true. But after three years building a program that puts robotics and AI directly into small manufacturing shops, I have reached a different conclusion for manufacturing specifically: without automation, many of these companies will not have enough skilled workers left to keep the lights on at all.

This matters because the choice in front of American manufacturing is not jobs versus robots. It is robots versus no company left to employ anyone.

The Moment I Began to See It Differently

In June 2022, my team at the Southland Development Authority stood up the Metals HUB program — a strategic initiative aimed at revitalizing the metals manufacturing sector across Chicago’s south suburbs.

At the time, the prevailing diagnosis of these companies’ troubles looked like a sales problem: aging owners, shrinking customer bases, outdated equipment. The obvious fix seemed to be more business development — help small metals, machinery, and equipment (MM&E) shops find new customers and new contracts.

Then we got closer to the floor of these shops. What we found was not just a sales gap. It was a workforce cliff. Skilled machinists and fabricators were retiring faster than anyone was training replacements, and the shops most exposed to that cliff were also the ones running the oldest equipment.

What became clear was that helping these companies win new business would not matter if they did not have the people, or the productivity per person, to fulfill it. The problem was not simply that these firms needed more customers. The deeper problem was that they needed to produce more value with fewer skilled hands on the floor.

The Problem Beneath the Problem

We usually describe this as a labor shortage. We say manufacturers need more workers, more training programs, more incentives to keep young people in the trades.

Those things would and do help. But they do not address the fundamental issue: even in the best case, there are not enough new skilled workers entering manufacturing to replace the wave of retirements already underway, and international instability is pushing more of the supply chain back onto American soil at the same time. Although this statistic is a bit dated, Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute estimated in 2024 that U.S. manufacturing could need 3.8 million new workers by 2033, and that 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled.

The real constraint is productivity per available worker. AI and robotics have been used by some manufacturers to increase the productivity of the existing and ever smaller workforce already but without a serious increase in how much a single skilled worker can produce, American manufacturers cannot fill the growing gap between the volume of work coming home and the number of people available to do it.

This is why the conventional advice — hire more, train more, wait for the labor market to loosen — often produces short-term relief rather than a lasting fix. It treats a structural gap as a cyclical one.

This is not a hiring problem. It is a productivity-per-worker problem, and it is why robotics has moved from optional upgrade to survival strategy for shops that want to still exist in ten years.

The Signal

Robotics deployed to replace workers is a losing strategy. Robotics deployed to multiply the workers you already have is the only strategy that works when there simply are not enough people left to hire.

When a manufacturer treats automation as a way to shrink headcount, they get short-term savings and a workforce that resists the change. When a manufacturer treats automation as a way to make each remaining skilled worker more productive, they get a shop that can take on more volume without needing to find workers who may not exist.

The difference is not how many robots you install. It is whether the goal is fewer people or more output per person.

Once we understand that distinction, the question changes from “How do we replace workers with robots?” to “How do we make our existing workers radically more productive before we lose them to retirement?”

The Structure: The Metals HUB Model

To make this practical, the Metals HUB works from a four-part framework designed to help legacy manufacturers modernize without abandoning the workers who built them.

1. Fill the sales and outreach gap.

Ask: Can our smallest manufacturers reach the OEMs and new markets on their own, or do they need a connector?

Many MM&E firms in the Southland and Midwest are too small to have dedicated sales or business development staff. The Metals HUB fills this gap directly, connecting local manufacturers to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and helping them secure new contracts they could not have found on their own. SDA’s APEX Accelerator extends that reach to the public sector, giving these same firms no-cost help registering, getting certified and competing for federal, state and local government contracts.

2. Modernize the shop floor deliberately.

Ask: Is the technology we’re deploying comprehensive enough to boost productivity, but comfortable enough for the team actually running it?

Programs like the Metals HUB Sensor Kit — built on digital manufacturing technology from MxD, the Department of Defense’s National Center for Cybersecurity in Manufacturing — give shops real-time visibility into their own efficiency. Advising on robotics integration only works when it is matched to what a shop’s workforce can absorb; the goal is comprehensive enough to matter, comfortable enough to adopt.

3. Build the workforce pipeline you can’t hire your way into.

Ask: Where is the next generation of skilled machinists and fabricators actually coming from?

For the last three years, the Metals HUB has run an internship program that prepares young talent for manufacturing careers, because no amount of automation replaces the need for skilled people to run, maintain, and improve those systems. Robotics and workforce development are not competing priorities. They are the same strategy.

4. Support the ownership transition.

Ask: What happens to this company when its current owner retires?

Many manufacturers close not because they fail, but because there is no plan for who runs them next. The Metals HUB helps facilitate succession planning and acquisitions, so operational knowledge does not retire along with the owner.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Consider a Southland metals shop typical of the firms in our pipeline: an aging owner, a shrinking crew of veteran machinists, and equipment old enough that OEMs were hesitant to send larger contracts its way. From the outside, the problem looked like a shop that simply needed new machines.

But when we applied the Metals HUB framework, a different issue emerged: the bigger constraint was not the equipment. It was that the shop had no plan for what happens when its owner retires, and no efficiency data to prove to OEMs it could handle more volume even if it modernized.

By combining the Sensor Kit’s efficiency data, direct OEM introductions, and a succession-planning conversation, the shop moved from an aging, contract-starved operation to one positioned to take on new volume with a clear ownership path. I have changed identifying details, but this pattern is one we see repeatedly across the Southland’s manufacturing base.

Why This Matters Beyond One Decision

The implications extend beyond any single shop.

For individual workers, this means skilled expertise becomes more valuable, not less, as productivity per worker becomes the constraint that matters most.

For manufacturers, it means survival depends on adopting the right technology and building a succession plan before retirement forces the issue.

For regions, it means the same demographic mix that makes the Southland complex — a blend of rural, urban, and suburban communities — mirrors many other deindustrialized regions nationally, which is exactly why the Metals HUB model is exportable.

A region’s manufacturing legacy survives only if productivity per worker rises faster than its workforce shrinks.

The Move

This week, if you run, own, or advise a manufacturing business, take twenty minutes and answer this question: where in our operation could a single piece of automation make our most skilled worker two or three times more productive, without eliminating a single job?

Then identify: which skilled workers are nearing retirement, and whether a real succession or knowledge-transfer plan exists for them; the one point in your process most limited by hands rather than ideas; and one realistic piece of technology, a sensor, a robotic arm, a digital tracking system, you could pilot this year.

Do not begin by asking how to cut headcount. Begin by asking how to make the people you already have irreplaceable.

Final Thought

I began by asking whether robots would take manufacturing jobs away.

My answer is that the greater risk is not robots taking jobs. It is not having enough people left to keep the jobs running at all.

We cannot control the pace of retirements, global competition, or how much reshoring pressure lands on American soil. But we can control whether the workers still on the floor are equipped with tools that multiply what they can do.

That begins when we stop treating automation as a threat to guard against and start treating it as the tool that keeps American manufacturing communities alive.

American manufacturing will not survive on nostalgia. It will survive on robots working alongside the people who know how to run them.

A question for you:

What is one task in your operation that a machine could do better, freeing your best people for the work only they can do?

Reply to this email or leave a comment. I read the responses, and they often shape what I explore next.

The Metals HUB is part of the Southland Development Authority’s work to modernize manufacturing across Chicago’s south suburbs. Learn more here: Southland Development Authority.org.

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About the Southland Development Authority

The Southland Development Authority, a not-for-profit economic development organization, is committed to driving equitable and sustainable economic growth in the South Suburbs of Chicago. Through innovative programs, strategic partnerships, and impactful direct investments, the SDA is building a vibrant, inclusive economy that drives wealth growth for individuals, businesses, and municipalities. Combined with the benefits of the South Suburban Land Bank and the Monarch Fund, the SDA serves as a model for regional development.