Crystal Ball 2025 finale: AI and its influence on software and manufacturing security

AI is a widely covered topic, but there’s much chatter about what the technology can and will do to shield your critical manufacturing systems … or help intruders to worm their way into them and cause a lot of damage and high recovery costs.

Scott Achelpohl

Jan. 16, 2025

5 min read

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Welcome to the Crystal Ball Report for 2025, which is appearing in this web space as a series of contributed pieces from esteemed experts in manufacturing technology.

We've invited these thought leaders to look into their "crystal balls" and tell us what's ahead (with an emphasis on data, AI, and cybersecurity).

So please enjoy the series and, from all of us at SI, have a prosperous and profitable new year.

OK, it’s my turn.

In the past month, almost 30 stakeholders in manufacturing technology looked into their “crystal balls” and told us what’s to come in various industrial tech in 2025, and yes, we did hear a lot from them about AI, didn’t we, in our series, which concludes with this article?

In old newspaper parlance, AI has made for a lot of “column inches,” last year and into this new one.

Episode 4 of (R)Evolutionizing Manufacturing: The Art of the Possible and The Art of the Practical

I set out with this column to give you my take, which is considerably less informed than theirs. That was the point of giving them such a large soapbox.

That said, I encourage everyone you know to check out the new Crystal Ball series.

There’s some nuanced detail in those stories that, in my very biased opinion, is very helpful to our understanding of how digital transformation is evolving and what technologies will hold the key.

More of the Crystal Ball series:

Insights on 2025 from talks with manufacturers, by Josh Cranfill, Quickbase
AI, automation, and insider threat detection, by Chris Scheels, Gurucul
Business leaders should look inward to identify what they can control, by Michael van Keulen, Coupa
Cybersecurity trends that will reshape private content security, by Patrick Spencer, Kiteworks
Configurability, modularity, and AI: The 2025 challenges, by Damantha Boteju, Henrik Hulgaard, and Daniel Joseph Barry, Configit
The rise of resilient manufacturing, by Aron Brand, CTERA
2025 prediction thread, Part 1, by various authors
2025 prediction thread, Part 2, by various authors
Your opinion counts: Results from SI's reader poll on 2025, by Scott Achelpohl, Smart Industry

I’ll also pull my view from the cheap seats out of a survey of our audience that’s been running with every piece of content on Smart Industry for two months and from “word on the street” at the latest technology show I’ve attended, CES 2025, in Las Vegas Jan. 5-10.

See also: Worst in Show Awards

An interesting subset of AI discussion has developed, gleaned from the survey and through discussion at CES and at other industry events—that AI is a double-edged sword when it comes to cybersecurity in manufacturing software and systems. AI offers tremendous tools to defend industrial IT and OT, for both your company and the intruders who seek to break in.

I heard warnings at CES from a couple of cybersecurity vendors (one who services the utility industry) that cybersecurity in operational technology is a gigantic problem. My anonymous source met tech people from one utility who were running OT off computer systems operating on Windows 7. That’s 2009 stuff, people, barely into the Obama administration, the first one.

How could such an outdated OS provide any kind of useful barrier against modern cyber intrusion? Many utility operations form critical public infrastructure, too. I was, frankly, aghast. We’ll focus more on utilities in 2025, too.

If we, therefore, seem at Smart Industry like we are paying outsized attention in 2025 to cybersecurity (as the Crystal Ball series also intentionally did), there’s a reason.

Maybe one message we’ll bring you in this new year will be to update the technology that runs your plant floor, because it’s frightening to hear these horror stories about how vulnerable your tech possibly is to intrusion. It’s shockingly easy to get in. I’m not saying it; the experts are.

Best of 2024: SI looks back at our favorite features

Want to cost your organization millions in downtime (maybe millions more in ransom to sophisticated system intruders) and even more to a security vendor to prevent the next hack from occurring? Don’t update your systems or how you go about keeping your technology secure. There’s a relatively new expression for this: FAFO. We won’t go into what the acronym stands for, but you get the picture—and it’s not pretty, not at all.

There are common-sense solutions that we've presented all through 2024 (and will continue to present this year) for reinforcing your cyber defenses.

We've featured experts like Kiteworks CISO Frank Balonis, a 20-year veteran in IT support and protecting manufacturing systems, in an episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast—and Frank (as well as myself) will return for a webinar this month presented by Yubico.

What our reader survey told us

OK, now to the reader survey …

The poll, which lived on our site for several months, was a very simple one to take, but the results delivered a very clear message: When asked “which manufacturing technology will most attract attention in 2025,” almost half (48%) of respondents answered AI and machine learning. This tells us (and you) that, in addition to cybersecurity, our focus in 2025 will be very AI- and ML-oriented.

Additionally, another 17% in the survey said industrial internet of things (IIoT) for tasks such as predictive maintenance (always a focus of ours) while 11% others said automation and robotics. More fodder for coverage opportunities this year at Smart Industry.

Podcast: Insights from our team of editors on how 2024 transformed manufacturing (Part 1)

Podcast: Insights from our team of editors on how 2024 transformed manufacturing (Part 2)

Other topics—additive manufacturing and 3D printing (which IMHO are important but have become niche processes), metaverse (virtual environments for training and monitoring) and sustainable production (tech that helps reduce your plant’s carbon footprint)—ranked in the low single digits by comparison among respondents.

That last one is personally disappointing to me, with only 3% citing sustainable manufacturing as worthy of attention. The planet is important, our only home. We’re learning the hard way right now in L.A. We learned a lot from the survey and from the Crystal Ball series.

I also encourage everyone to check out our new State of Initiative Report, which takes a deeper dive into what company tech people and stakeholders are thinking in regard to about digital transformation.

See also: The 2024 Crystal Ball Report

About the Author

Scott Achelpohl

I've come to Smart Industry after stints in business-to-business journalism covering U.S. trucking and transportation for FleetOwner, a sister website and magazine of SI’s at Endeavor Business Media, and branches of the U.S. military for Navy League of the United States. I'm a graduate of the University of Kansas and the William Allen White School of Journalism with many years of media experience inside and outside B2B journalism. I'm a wordsmith by nature, and I edit Smart Industry and report and write all kinds of news and interactive media on the digital transformation of manufacturing.