# The Trends Scorecard: Manufacturing – What I Predicted, and What Actually Happened
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"The trends always said where manufacturing was headed. The future went to those who listened — and got to work." — Futurist Jim Carroll For 20+ years, I've stood on stages around the world telling manufacturing audiences what was coming next. So let's do something most futurists carefully avoid: let's go back, dig up what I actually said, and grade it. No cherry-picking. Here's the scorecard. The setup: a sector everyone keeps writing off For two decades, the story told about North American manufacturing has been the same: it's dying, it's done, it's gone to China, it's never coming back. I've never believed that would be true for organizations that chose to listen to what the trends told them - and I've been saying so on stage since the mid-2000s. Back in 2011, keynoting IMX in Las Vegas alongside a retired CEO of Porsche and the U.S. government's first "Chief Manufacturing Officer," I put it bluntly to a room of 400 executives: "Some people see a trend and see a threat. Innovators see the same trend and see nothing but opportunity." Looking back at my slide deck from that event, I can clearly see where I first used that phrase which has defined so much of my mindset. And that thinking clearly applies to the world of manufacturing. There are those who are busy reinventing, reinvesting, reimagining and reengineering. They are rethinking how they do everything, adopting leading edge technologies and concepts, and are loading up on the innovative new manufacturing methodologies available to them. And yet sadly,  there are many others who have come to believe that bluster, barriers and blowhards will somehow magically lead to a renaissance int the industry - that the 'olden days' will be brought back through some sort of magic trick. You know my thoughts on the latter. Back to the key point of this post - taking a look at what I predicted vs. what has transpired. Here's what I called, and how it played out. Prediction #1 — "Volatility is the new normal" (2006) — Nailed it Working a room of manufacturing CEOs in 2006 — two years before the financial crisis — I told them to stop planning for stability and start building for chaos: Here's your new production mantra: volatility is the new normal. The last five years have taught us that unpredictability now comes at us in regular waves. The grade: Since then we've lived through a global financial collapse, a trade war, a pandemic that shattered every supply chain on earth, a chip shortage, and a reshoring scramble. "Volatility is the new normal" stopped being a provocative keynote line and became the literal operating condition of the industry. I'll take this one. Prediction #2 — Additive manufacturing replaces "cutting, drilling and bashing metal" (2011 & 2015) — Largely right I was banging the drum on 3D printing early and often. In 2011: One of the most fascinating developments... involves the use of "3D printers" and the inevitable shift to "additive manufacturing" from "subtractive manufacturing based on cutting, drilling and bashing metal." And by 2015 I was calling it "probably the biggest change the industry will witness in coming years." The grade: Mostly a hit, with a caveat. Additive manufacturing is now genuinely mainstream for prototyping, tooling, aerospace and medical parts, and it's a multi-billion-dollar industry. Where I was early rather than wrong: the idea that everyone would own a printer and that additive would displace mass production hasn't arrived. It's a powerful tool in the box, not the whole factory. Call it a strong B+. Prediction #3 — Build-to-demand kills build-to-inventory (2015) — Spot on In 2015, I used a specific company to make the point: Big auto companies build hundreds of thousands of vehicles, and shove them out to dealers hoping they sell. Tesla Motors takes an order, and builds the vehicle to send to the customer. Big difference — and this model is driving fundamental business model change across every aspect of the manufacturing sector. I regularly shared the idea of the Tesla business model, as found in this quote, from the stage. I remember all the skeptics along the way - senior manufacturing executives who told me that the idea of Tesla, and its unique production methods, was doomed to fail. The grade: Picking Tesla as the model in 2015 has aged extremely well. Build-to-order, configure-to-demand, and made-to-order logistics are now the aspiration across the sector, and the company I named is now one of the most valuable manufacturers on the planet. A clean hit (even if I am no longer a fan of Tesla, despite owning one.) Prediction #4 — "Everything plugs into everything else" (the connected factory) (2011) — Hit Pervasive connectivity and intelligent assembly: the definitive trend for the next decade, in which "everything plugs into everything else."... we will know three things about every device on the planet — their location, their status, and their Internet address. The grade: I called it "the definitive trend for the next decade." The world later gave it a name — Industry 4.0, the Industrial Internet of Things — and built it. Location, status, and an address for every device is now the baseline architecture of a modern plant. Right call, right timeline. Prediction #5 — Cobots and many-axis robotics (2017) — Right I think cobots are coming out very quickly. We're getting away from two-plane robotic capability to six or eight or 10-plane capability and more spatial awareness. The grade: Collaborative robots went from novelty to one of the fastest-growing categories in factory automation, exactly as described. Solid hit. Prediction #6 — AI becomes the engine of manufacturing (2023) — Tracking — too early to grade My most recent big swing. In 2023 I flagged the trajectory in the headline itself: AI in manufacturing "going from $6.2 billion to $181 billion in 8 years," and pointed to a CEO survey showing the reshoring wave was already underway: 82% of CEOs have or are actively embracing reshoring strategies, up significantly from 55% in the previous survey. The grade: Incomplete. This is the live one, underway now. The early signals (predictive maintenance, machine vision quality control, AI-driven supply chain optimization, accelerating reshoring) are all moving in the predicted direction. Ask me again in 2028 and we'll see whether the $181 billion number holds. The one I got wrong. A scorecard that's all wins isn't a scorecard, it's a brochure. So here's where I was early: back in 2019, mapping manufacturing to 2030, I described a world where "the concept of inventory" effectively ends and additive manufacturing moves production right next to the consumer. We're moving that way, but inventory, warehouses and long supply chains are still very much alive in 2026. The direction was right; the speed was optimistic. What the scorecard tells us about what's next Here's why this exercise matters beyond keeping me honest. The predictions that landed weren't lucky guesses. They came from a single, repeatable method: watch where the technology curve is bending, assume it bends faster than the consensus expects, and follow it to its logical conclusion. As I told New Equipment Digest back in 2017, in the line that still sums up my whole approach to this sector: We're in a situation in which companies that do not yet exist will build products not yet conceived using materials not yet invented with maybe manufacturing methodologies that don't exist fulfilling a customer need we don't even yet know. Twenty years of scorecard says the method works. That's the entire point of keeping score. It's not to take a victory lap, but to earn the right to be believed about what comes next. And the bend in the curve ahead is steeper than anything on this scorecard so far. So where does manufacturing actually go from here? That's a separate conversation, and a longer one than a scorecard can hold. I've mapped it out sector by sector in my current series, The Way Forward.  It takes a look at the trends, the barriers, and the playbook for acting on them. If these receipts convinced you the method works, that's where you'll find where it's pointing next. Next in the series, I'll run the same scorecard on a sector I've been predicting just as long: healthcare. Stay tuned.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/06/the-trends-scorecard-manufacturing-what-i-predicted-and-what-actually-happened/