The 2026 Manufacturing Outlook: How Leaders are Investing, Adapting, and Competing

This SME Media–hosted webinar (sponsored by CADDi) is a manufacturing outlook discussion built around CADDi’s 2026 Manufacturing Outlook Survey, drawing on responses from ~230 U.S. manufacturing leaders (senior manager through C-suite) across a broad mix of verticals.

The presenters, Aaron Lober (VP Marketing, CADDi US), Chris Cope (VP Engineering), and Patrick Harrigan (VP Partnerships), frame 2026 as a year of “winning with fewer people, higher costs, and no margin for error.” They contrast 2025 (described as comparatively stronger investment and expansion) with 2026, where leaders expect to prioritize operational efficiency, ROI discipline, and doubling down on what already works rather than launching big new initiatives.

Key themes covered:

• Skilled labor shortage as the top constraint (described as accelerating and now affecting not just the shop floor but also engineering, design, and operations), driving companies to focus on hiring/training/retention and tools that help newer employees ramp faster using institutional knowledge.
• AI adoption is widespread but uneven: many manufacturers have tried pilots, some failed to deliver ROI, and concerns around data quality and cybersecurity (including risks of uploading proprietary data to public LLMs and “hallucinations” impacting processes) are prominent.
• A major quantified inefficiency: employees spend ~1 hour/day searching for parts data, positioning better parts-data access as a lever for large productivity gains.
• Practical “fast ROI” opportunities emphasized include design/part reuse (framed as one of the highest-impact decisions), better engineering–procurement collaboration, and reducing friction caused by siloed systems of record (PLM/PDM vs ERP, etc.), which limit context-sharing and cause rework.
• The webinar closes with actionable guidance: start with business problems and ROI targets, not tools, run cross-functional ideation/stack-ranking to find high-value low-effort starting points, and focus on building repeatable, predictable AI workflows (including strong prompting practices) rather than “trying AI and seeing what happens.”

Overall, it’s a strategy-and-practice session aimed at manufacturing leaders looking for near-term operational wins, especially by leveraging existing design and supplier knowledge, while navigating 2026 headwinds like labor scarcity, cost pressure, and policy uncertainty. Access the on-demand recording today.