Lessons from the Executive Speaker Series-Manufacturing Panel, May 19, 2026 - MBA in Erie, PA
Ok, keeping them up at night may be an exaggeration, but it is at the forefront of their minds. At least in the forefront of the minds of manufacturers who want to stay competitive and grow in a competitive industry.
- AI in manufacturing — not the hype, but how leaders are actually using it today to get more from the teams they already have
- The talent pipeline — a generation-long gap in the trades that is quietly becoming a crisis, and what manufacturers are doing about it
There's a version of the AI conversation that gets exhausting fast. The hype. The fear. The breathless predictions about what it will replace and when. The conversations seem to promise Utopia or Skynet. No in-between.
That's not the conversation that happened at the recent MBA Executive Speaker Series.
Sitting in the room with Christy Drabic of Wabtec Corporation, Jim Berkowski of Industrial Sales and Manufacturing, and Philip Katen, what emerged instead was a more grounded, practical look at what AI is doing inside manufacturing companies right now.
AI in Manufacturing: It’s a Tool.
The leaders in the room weren't dismissive of AI. They were using it. Christy described leaning on Microsoft Copilot daily, not for strategy, but for the things that slow her down. Parsing a dense contract. Getting a starting draft of a document she'd spend five minutes refining. Surfacing the three things she should be focused on at any given moment.
Philip's company went a step further. They partnered with Penn State students to build a sales prospecting agent that combs for signals among potential medical device customers. A process that could have potentially eat up hours upon hours in a sales engineer's week now runs in the background and delivers results in thirty to forty minutes.
Jim put it plainly: "AI is a tool. It's not gonna replace people. It's a tool that's gonna leverage your folks."
The words “leverage” and “adapt” kept coming up. The practical use case isn't AI doing the job. It's AI handling the parts of the job that drain your best people so they can focus on what requires human judgment, relationships, and expertise.
A few things the panel made clear about making AI work:
- Your processes must exist first. If the underlying systems and knowledge aren't there, AI has nothing to build on.
- Protect your data. Employees often don't realize when they're sharing proprietary company information. Policies need to come before adoption, not after.
- Share what's working. Christy keeps a Teams chat where her core team drops their best prompts. Institutional knowledge about how to use AI well is just as valuable as any other tribal knowledge.
- Challenge it. As one attendee (wish I got his name) a few spots away put it. Argue with AI. Push back on its answers. The results are measurably better when you do.
The Harder Problem: Where Will the People Come From?
Here's where the conversation shifted and where it got urgent.
AI can help a manufacturing company do more with the people they have. But what happens when the people aren't there?
Philip described it clearly: there is a lost generation in the trades. For roughly twenty to twenty-five years, virtually no one entered fields like tool and die, mold making, or machining. The cultural messaging was college or nothing. Manufacturing was seen as dirty, low-skilled, a fallback — not a career.
Now the bill is coming due.
Baby boomers who built careers in those trades are retiring in waves, taking decades of expertise with them. Philip noted his team includes toolmakers with forty-plus years of experience. His tooling manager, retiring next month, put in forty-four years. Try recruiting their replacements. They don't exist. Literally. They did not go to school for it. They did not enter the trade.
And the math doesn't look great. Fewer kids in trade schools today means fewer graduates entering the workforce tomorrow. The pipeline was already narrow. Demographics are making it narrower.
But the shortage of bodies is only part of the challenge.
The people who are coming into the workforce have different expectations and pretending otherwise isn't a strategy. Christy put it directly: the companies that will win are the ones that figure out how to adapt to the workforce, not the ones still trying to force the workforce to adapt to them.
This generation watched their parents skip vacations, work sixty-hour weeks, and chase a version of success defined by bigger cars and bigger houses. Many of them have decided they want something different. What some people may consider laziness others view as a different set of priorities. And if a business can't build a structure that accommodates that reality (rethinking pay scales, paid time off, how performance gets rewarded) it won't just struggle to attract people. It will struggle to keep them.
The Opportunity Hidden Inside the Crisis
What was striking, though, was the optimism underneath all of it.
Christy made a point that reframes the moment entirely: kids are sitting in classrooms right now being told by their teachers that AI is going to take the job they thought they wanted. White-collar, knowledge-work careers are suddenly the uncertain ones. And the jobs that will remain? Service, manufacturing, and trades. Those are the ones that require hands, skill, and presence.
The pendulum, as the moderator noted, is swinging back. It swung too far toward college-only thinking in the late nineties and early 2000s. Now gravity is pulling it back toward a more honest conversation about multiple paths to a good career.
Jim walked through the numbers plainly: a student who enters the trades through a vo-tech program, works part-time in manufacturing through their junior and senior years, and goes directly into the workforce can earn around $220,000 and build meaningful retirement savings by the time their college-bound peers are walking across a graduation stage carrying $300,000 in debt.
What's the prescription? The panel offered a few things working in the region:
- Manufacturing Day — now in its thirteenth year, brings thousands of students through real facilities to see what modern manufacturing looks like
- Plant tours for students, parents, and guidance counselors — because the adults in a kid's life shape the options they even think to consider
- High school partnerships — programs at General McLane, Fairview, McDowell, and Harbor Creek are putting students inside manufacturing environments before they ever graduate
- Mentorship — every person in the room, as Jim put it, probably knows someone under 30 who could use a nudge toward manufacturing. That one conversation matters.
The Through Line
What connects AI adoption and the talent crisis isn't just that they both live on a manufacturing leader's worry list. It's that they're actually the same problem, approached from different directions.
AI is a way to extend the capacity of the people you have. Workforce development is a way to build the pipeline for the people you need. Both require investment. Both require patience. And both require a cultural shift away from the way we've always done it, toward what the next twenty years demands.
Christy's closing call to action was simple: " What are you doing today to further the opportunities for the future? …Where are you planting that seed with one person under the age of 30 today?"
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