The picture is one of appetite held back by people. Over 50% of manufacturers cite skills shortages as the main barrier to AI adoption, and only 2% say AI is widely embedded across their operations, according to The Manufacturer / Make UK – AI, Skills and the Future of UK Manufacturing. So the technology is ready before the teams are, and that gap is where hiring pressure concentrates.
The wider productivity prize is large. The UK ranks just 24th in global robotics density, and targeted innovation and digital investment could add £150 billion to the UK's GDP by 2035, as set out in Making it Smarter: Global Lessons for Accelerating Automation and Digital Adoption in UK Manufacturing - Make UK. For context on how far there is to travel, Smart Machines Strategy 2035 - GOV.UK notes the UK was using only 101 robots per 10,000 workers in 2020, which substantially lags internationally.
Automation is reshaping jobs faster than most functions. Six in ten (59%) manufacturers cited automation and half (50%) cited wider digitalisation as trends changing jobs and skills needs, and 74% expect demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to increase by 2030, per Make UK – 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap. In plain terms, meta-cognitive skills are about how people learn, reason and check their own work, which is exactly what reviewing an agent's output demands.
Firms are also choosing to grow their own. Some 40% of manufacturers are looking to upskill their existing workforce, specifically for redeployment as a result of automation and digitalisation, and that figure rises for firms with more than 1,000 employees, according to Make UK Executive Survey 2026. A controls engineer who once wrote PLC logic by hand now spends more time specifying intent, reading agent-written code, and catching the edge cases a machine misses.
Hire for judgement, not just syntax. The valuable person now reviews what an agent produces, tests it against real machine behaviour, and owns the safety and governance around it. Write job descriptions around outcomes: can this person validate control logic, spot where an agent has guessed, and sign off changes with confidence? Those are the cognitive and meta-cognitive strengths that Make UK – 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap expects to grow in demand by 2030.
Then build, don't only buy. With 40% of manufacturers looking to upskill and redeploy existing people, as Make UK Executive Survey 2026 records, your best reviewers may already be on the floor. Pair external hires who bring AI fluency with internal engineers who know your machines, and give both a clear path to learn the other half. Move quickly too, because with skills shortages the top barrier to AI adoption in The Manufacturer / Make UK – AI, Skills and the Future of UK Manufacturing, the good people get hired fast.
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