Automation, AI, and education are essential for the future of manufacturing. That’s according to Michael Cicco, President & CEO at FANUC America Corp., who presented the first-ever keynote address for NPE: The Plastics Show. In particular, Cicco made an impassioned plea to attendees to collaborate with local communities to educate young people on the opportunities in manufacturing.
The challenge today is twofold, he noted: “Number one, we recognize there are not enough people out there today [to fill the manufacturing jobs available]. I spent the last 20 minutes or so talking about how automation can help bridge the gap to some of those things so you can stay as productive as possible in a plant, but maybe take away some of the dirty, dangerous jobs with robots. But another big problem we have is we don’t have enough people who know about robots, or who know about maintenance, or can actually do the things that we need to do in manufacturing. So we need to create those people.
