Automation and robotics make for an ‘exciting rebirth’ in North America
ABB CEO Joe Hogan makes an impassioned argument for encouraging growth of high tech manufacturing jobs in North America through automation.
With strong tailwinds pushing growth in the North American economy even in the face of incredible and sometimes incomprehensible political gridlock, it’s clear that automation is going to play a large role in the continuing recovery. As a company focused on power and automation, ABB is enjoying the fruits of this future economy already, and is investing heavily in solutions for the North American market.
Industrial automation equipment—including robots—can provide a host of benefits in an incredible variety of uses and as the affordability of this equipment has improved over time, the justification for automation has only gotten stronger.
“We’re so excited about automation,” said ABB’s CEO, Joe Hogan, at the annual Automation and Power World in Orlando, Florida, during a keynote this week. “There’s such a nexus of technology that’s coming together to supply real solutions on the automation side.”
As part of his remarks, Hogan also made an impassioned plea and provided an optimistic outlook on how the future of automation and robotics in the US will impact the North American economy and help spur job growth in new and better ways.
“As the United States begins to regain its manufacturing base, those jobs won’t come back to North America as they left 15 years ago,” said Hogan. “They are going to come back in a much more automated sense—so a complete retraining of the factory floor and workers and how we have to interface with that technology is going to have to occur. In industry we all know this and it presents some exciting opportunities and challenges for the future.”
For North American-based companies—and, in fact, many companies around the world—it means some shifting paradigms about what kind of skills and training are important for these new jobs, but these are things we view as hopeful signs.
“It’s an exciting time of rebirth,” said Hogan. “This is particularly true in North America and we should embrace it.” Within ABB’s Robotics business unit we fully agree and couldn’t have said it better.