Automate to Survive

The Small Manufacturer's Playbook for Cobots, AI, and the 2026 Labor Shortage

von Dai Tran

96 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

This week, North America's largest manufacturing trade show is running in Chicago. The pitch on the floor is the same one you've probably heard from every automation vendor who's called your shop this year: robots are cheaper, AI is smarter, and you can't afford to wait. Meanwhile, a quarter of the manufacturing workforce is heading toward retirement, and you genuinely can't find operators for the shift you're already short on.Both things are true. This book is for the shop owner who wants to act on that reality without getting sold a bill of goods.Written for manufacturers roughly 5 to 250 employees, this is a clear-eyed guide to collaborative robots, predictive maintenance sensors, digital twins, and AI-assisted inspection as they actually stand in 2026 - not as vendors describe them. You'll get real, dated data on the labor shortage driving the urgency, a snapshot of what's genuinely new at this year's IMTS show, and honest cobot and predictive-maintenance ROI figures, clearly separated from the vendor claims this book could not independently verify (and says so, by name, in a dedicated appendix).You'll also get the practical tools: a five-step adoption framework with a fully worked payback example using real math, not marketing math; a plain-English walk-through of 2026's Section 179 and bonus-depreciation rules, NIST manufacturing grants, and newly expanded SBA loan limits; a workforce chapter on apprenticeships and why automation doesn't solve your hiring problem by itself; and a chapter on shop-floor cybersecurity risk that most automation books skip entirely.This isn't a book that tells you automation will save your shop, and it isn't a book that tells you to wait it out. It's a sourced, skeptical, practical playbook for deciding - with your own numbers, not a vendor's best-case slide - what to automate first, how to pay for it, and how to protect your shop while you do it.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798174582170
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 15.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published