Automate 2026 offered no shortage of impressive technology. AI-powered robotics, digital twins, connected machines, autonomous systems, new vision technologies, and software-defined automation were all part of the conversation.
But after spending time on the show floor and listening to industry leaders throughout the week, the bigger story was not any single product or technology. It was how quickly the pieces of modern manufacturing are beginning to come together.
Artificial intelligence is moving closer to real production environments. IT and OT systems are becoming more connected. Manufacturers need automation that is easier to deploy because skilled labor remains difficult to find. At the same time, every new connection introduces cybersecurity considerations that can no longer be pushed to the end of a machine design.
Even the markets adopting automation are changing. The rapid buildout of AI data centers is creating demand for the same kinds of industrial control, monitoring, communication, and automation technologies manufacturers have relied on for years.
These were the five manufacturing trends that stood out most to us at Automate 2026.
1. Industrial AI Is Moving From Experimentation to Execution
AI was everywhere at Automate, but the conversation felt different than it did even a few years ago. The question is becoming less about whether AI belongs in manufacturing and more about where it can solve a practical problem.
What also stood out at Automate, however, was a healthy amount of caution. Manufacturing still requires predictable control, reliable performance, safety, and clear accountability. AI may recommend, optimize, diagnose, or assist, but that does not mean every deterministic control function should suddenly be handed over to a probabilistic model.
That distinction is important for HMI development as well.
That may be one of the most realistic near-term paths for industrial AI: not replacing the engineering process, but making the people already doing the work faster and better equipped.
2. The Future of Automation Depends on Better IT/OT Connectivity
If AI was the most visible topic at Automate, connectivity may have been the most important underlying one.
AI cannot optimize a process if it cannot access meaningful process data. A digital twin cannot accurately represent production if the equipment generating the data remains isolated. Enterprise analytics cannot provide much value if machine information is trapped inside proprietary systems.
That is why IT/OT convergence, interoperability, and software-defined automation appeared repeatedly throughout the talks.
The State of the Automation Industry keynote made a similar argument: manufacturers may have numerous proprietary systems operating inside one plant, but AI depends on harmonized data. That is helping drive interest in architectures that separate software capabilities from individual hardware platforms while maintaining deterministic control where it is needed.
This is an area where an HMI increasingly does more than provide a touchscreen for a PLC.
For existing machines, that connectivity does not necessarily require replacing the entire controls architecture. Weintek cMT G Series IIoT Gateways are specifically designed to help bring legacy equipment into modern IIoT, SCADA, and ERP environments. They can connect existing industrial protocols with technologies such as MQTT, OPC UA, and SQL while allowing established machine systems to remain in place.
That brownfield piece matters. The manufacturing industry’s path toward more connected and eventually more autonomous operations will not happen by replacing every machine in every factory. It will depend heavily on finding practical ways to make existing equipment part of the broader data architecture.
3. The Labor Shortage Is Making Ease of Use a Design Requirement
Manufacturing’s workforce challenge came up in nearly every major conversation we attended.
For years, manufacturers could evaluate an automation project primarily around throughput, consistency, quality, or labor savings. Today, some operations need automation simply because there are not enough people available to perform the work.
But Automate’s speakers repeatedly made another point: buying more automation will not solve the workforce problem if the technology still requires a small group of highly specialized experts to operate it.
The robotics roundtable discussed the need for robots that can be deployed and operated by a broader group of users. Speakers specifically connected easier programming and more intuitive systems with the industry’s ability to expand automation into small and midsize manufacturers.
That trend connects directly to how HMI software is developed.
EasyBuilder Pro is license-free and provides a common development environment across current Weintek HMI products, with built-in tools for visualization, alarming, trending, data logging, communication, scripting, and other common machine requirements. It also supports more than 400 industrial drivers.
The new AI Assistant extends the same idea by helping engineers with project development rather than creating another separate tool they have to learn.
None of these technologies eliminates the skills problem. What they can do is reduce friction, make expertise easier to apply across more equipment, and help the skilled people manufacturers already have accomplished more.
4. Cybersecurity Is Becoming Part of the Machine Specification
More connectivity creates more capability. It also creates more responsibility.
The same IT/OT convergence that makes real-time analytics, remote support, AI, and enterprise-level visibility possible also expands the number of connected systems that have to be secured.
Cybersecurity therefore appeared throughout Automate not as a separate IT subject, but as part of the future architecture of automation itself.
The International Federation of Robotics included safety, cybersecurity, data privacy, and standards among its five major robotics trends for 2026. Its Automate presentation specifically raised concerns around data protection, AI model integrity, accountability, safety validation, and governance as connected systems become more intelligent.
The From Complexity to Autonomy panel made the relationship especially clear. Open and connected industrial systems need secure software development practices, appropriate network isolation, patchability, and active monitoring. The answer is not returning to completely isolated automation. It is engineering connected systems with security built into the architecture.
For OEM machine builders, this shift is increasingly visible during equipment specification and procurement.
That does not make the HMI responsible for securing an entire industrial system. Network architecture, access policies, PLCs, servers, remote connections, firewalls, users, and other components still matter.
What it does mean is that cybersecurity can no longer be something an OEM considers after the machine has already been designed. The connected components going into the cabinet are increasingly part of the cybersecurity conversation from the beginning.
5. Data Centers Are Becoming an Industrial Automation Market
One of the more interesting shifts at Automate was how often the conversation moved outside the traditional factory. The most obvious example was AI data centers.
The technologies inside the facilities are changing quickly as well. Panelists discussed higher rack densities, liquid cooling, changing power architectures, autonomous maintenance, and the need for much more precise system-level control. They also pointed to commissioning and cable management as areas that remain highly manual and could become future automation opportunities.
For the automation industry, that creates an important new application space. A data center may serve a very different purpose from a factory, but many of the underlying control challenges are familiar: monitoring equipment, collecting real-time data, communicating between different protocols, managing alarms, visualizing system status, controlling distributed infrastructure, and enabling remote diagnostics.
That is where industrial HMI and IIoT technologies can have a role.
Weintek HMIs provide alarming, trending, operational monitoring, data communication, and remote visualization capabilities, while cMT X Advanced models support connectivity such as MQTT, OPC UA, and SQL. For systems where a traditional panel-mounted interface is not necessary, Weintek also offers headless HMI and IIoT gateway architectures that can collect and move machine or infrastructure data without requiring a dedicated local touchscreen.
As data center infrastructure becomes more modular and more automated, the line between traditional building infrastructure and industrial process automation may continue to blur.
What Automate 2026 Told Us About the Next Phase of Manufacturing
The biggest takeaway from Automate 2026 was not that one technology is about to change manufacturing overnight. It was that several trends that have been developing independently are now beginning to reinforce each other.
AI needs better industrial data. Better data requires more connected and interoperable machines. More connectivity raises the importance of cybersecurity. Workforce shortages increase the need for automation, while simultaneously creating pressure to make that automation easier to configure, operate, and maintain. And rapidly growing markets such as data centers are creating entirely new places to apply the industrial automation technologies manufacturers already understand.
The HMI sits at an interesting point in that transition.
It is still the interface operators use to understand and control a machine, but increasingly it can also serve as a connection point between controllers, industrial data, remote users, SCADA platforms, databases, and IIoT systems. The value of the HMI is therefore becoming less about the screen alone and more about how effectively it helps people, machines, and data work together.
That is the direction we saw throughout Automate 2026, and it is one we expect to keep shaping industrial automation well beyond this year’s show.
Key Takeaways:
- Supporting multiple protocols is essential for meeting strict application needs.
- The protocol chosen should always reflect the structure, processing speed, and feature requirements of the application.