Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence: Plenty of Robots, Few Plants Using AI, and the Question of Organisational Readiness

Purpose. Manufacturing has used automation for decades, so it might be expected to be the leading user of AI. This article asks how far AI has actually spread through factories by 2026, what slows it, and where manufacturing may be by about 2035. Design and methods. A review that combines the share of the manufacturing research literature that involves AI (OpenAlex, 2010–2025), Eurostat's survey of AI use in EU manufacturing enterprises (2021–2025), a US Census Bureau survey of AI use in plants, industry statistics on robot installations, and published reviews of predictive maintenance. Claims taken from the literature were checked against the sources cited. The scenarios are judgements built on this evidence. Findings. The share of manufacturing works that mention AI rose from 2.1% in 2018 to 14.4% in 2025 (6.8 times as much), with language-model works still rare (6.8% of AI-related works). Use in factories lags research. In the EU, 17.3% of manufacturing enterprises used AI in 2025, up from 6.9% in 2021 but below the 19.9% for all enterprises; only 3.5% used it in production processes, and the leading technologies were text mining (9.4%) and language generation (7.1%). A Census Bureau survey found that 22.8% of US manufacturing plants reported any AI use in 2021, with cost and lack of an applicable use case the most cited barriers and prior productivity not predicting use. Robots, in contrast, are well established: 542,000 were installed worldwide in 2024. We expect AI to spread first in inspection, maintenance and planning and in office-side tasks, a gradual rise in plant-level use through 2028, and the gains from AI to depend on organisational readiness, which is slow to build. Originality. The article contrasts the volume of research with measured use in plants, using adoption data for the factory floor rather than for the whole firm, and frames the outlook around organisational readiness, which the recent evidence identifies as the limiting factor.