Manufacturing News
November 8, 2026
November 8, 2026 · Statewide · Story 5 of 5
Penn State Researcher Flags a Labor Market Splitting in Two Directions at Once
Penn State's Ilya Kovalenko, who leads the university's Control and Automation for Intelligent Systems Lab, said in a Nov. 5 interview that U.S. manufacturing has drawn trillions of dollars in investment since the start of 2026 and now accounts for more than half of private-sector research spending, with custom automation and humanoid robotics as the near-term way to staff the repetitive, dangerous jobs smaller shops can't fill. A separate study released the same week found 47.57% of Indiana jobs could be automated away, the third-highest share in the nation, even as the Indiana Manufacturers Association counts more than 20,000 open manufacturing positions and Conexus Indiana projects 85,000 of 178,000 new advanced manufacturing and logistics jobs going unfilled by 2033. Smaller shops, the ones Kovalenko says carry the backbone of U.S. manufacturing, are also the ones least able to afford a robots-as-a-service contract like the one Toyota signed with Agility Robotics, which raises the odds that smaller suppliers consolidate into larger tier suppliers instead of automating on their own.
- Impact
- A separate study released the same week found 47.57% of Indiana jobs are at risk of automation displacement, the third-highest share in the nation, even as the Indiana Manufacturers Association counts more than 20,000 open manufacturing positions and Conexus Indiana projects 85,000 of 178,000 new advanced manufacturing and logistics jobs going unfilled by 2033. That's a bifurcated labor market forming faster than policy can track, and the smaller shops Kovalenko flags as the backbone of U.S. manufacturing are the ones least able to afford robots-as-a-service contracts like the one Toyota signed with Agility Robotics, raising the odds of consolidation toward larger tier suppliers.
- Watch
- Kovalenko's Nov. 13, 2026 seminar at Ohio State on adaptive manufacturing systems, and any follow-up Indiana-specific data on which job categories the 47.57% automation-risk figure actually covers.
- For the huddle
If nearly half of Indiana jobs are flagged as automation-exposed while we still can't fill our own open manufacturing roles, where should automation go first, backfilling the jobs we can't staff, or replacing the ones we already have filled?
Sources
- New Tool Shows Manufacturing and Logistics Companies Where They Stand on AI · buildingindiana.com
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- Penn State Researcher Flags a Labor Market Splitting in Two Directions at Once
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