The wider labour market is quiet. The Low Pay Commission describes conditions as 'low hire, low fire', with weaker recruitment and vacancies below pre-pandemic levels the Low Pay Commission's 2025 report. Manufacturing, though, is a different story: the skills gap keeps growing rather than shrinking.
Make UK counts 55,000 unfilled long-term vacancies in UK manufacturing, costing the economy around £6bn in lost output every year Make UK's Industrial Strategy Skills Commission report. Manufacturers themselves point to the cause. Three quarters name skills shortages as their top barrier to growth, ahead of recruitment and talent retention Barclays Corporate's research on the UK manufacturing skills shortage. That is the backdrop as supplier agents arrive on the plant floor.
Supplier agents are AI systems that place orders, chase deliveries and manage parts of the supply chain automatically. When software starts making calls that used to sit with a person, someone has to check its work, set its limits and step in when it gets things wrong. That someone is a new hire.
The catch is that the same skills gap slowing hiring also slows adoption. Over half of manufacturers cite skills shortages as the main barrier to AI adoption, and only 2% say AI is widely embedded across their operations Make UK and The Manufacturer's report on AI, skills and the future of UK manufacturing. So the roles emerging now sit between engineering and governance: people who understand the process, read the data and own the decisions an agent is trusted to make.
There is a route into these jobs, too. Apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 the DSIT AI Labour Market Survey 2025, which gives plants a way to grow oversight talent rather than only compete for it.
Start with the decision, not the tool. Write down exactly what the supplier agent is allowed to do on its own, what needs sign-off and what triggers a human stepping in. That job specification tells you the mix you need: process knowledge, data literacy and the confidence to say no to a system.
Then widen your pool. Demand for technical people is real: professional, scientific and technical activities saw the largest volume rise in vacancies in late 2025 ONS vacancy figures for November 2025, so you are competing hard for experienced hires. Balance that by building your own, using apprenticeships and internal moves to grow oversight skills on site.
Finding the right person for a role that barely existed 18 months ago is hard when you are searching by hand. We search a database of 15 million people, rank a shortlist against your brief and handle the process end to end, so you can focus on defining the oversight role rather than sifting CVs. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Tell Reed.ai what your plant needs to oversee, and we will surface people who can do it.
