Use your head: be one step ahead!

Personalisation, people-machine collabs and cobots – Meet Industry 5.0

It’s that time of year. We’re getting close to the finish line for 2024, and many of us are already thinking and planning ahead about what our goals are for the new year. One specific topic I am keen on watching in 2025 is how the continued advancement of Industry 5.0 plays out across various industries, and in the automotive sector in particular.

The automobile industry has had a rough year, with some pushback against use of electric vehicles (EVs) and administrative bodies at the regional and local levels across Europe working to deliver the infrastructure needed to make an EV-led automotive market work in real, daily terms for consumers. And this is a point where I feel that some of the ideas outlined in the Industry 5.0 concept can help. As we look to marry the human factor with tech innovation, we need to make sure this relationship truly works and remains viable over the longer term.

What elements in the automotive sector will Industry 5.0 impact?

In looking at a report from Knauf Industries, I thought they did a good summary of where Industry 5.0 picks up after the Industry 4.0 period. They essentially state that Industry 4.0 gave us the tech tools (mass connectivity, Internet of Things, advanced data analytics) and now it’s the task of Industry 5.0 to connect those with the People Factor. As the automotive sector moves into the Industry 5.0 era, more investment and skills will be needed to guide technological tools in making them people-friendly and conducive to delivering a better user/customer experience. The Industry 5.0 moment will see tech-driven processes focus on developing products and solutions customised to individual needs (for both people and organisations), and refined production processes will place greater emphasis on sustainability, circularity and overall "greenness" for products and resource usage planning.

What does this mean for labour markets?

So for job candidates and career aspirants in the auto sector, it will be imperative that they get on top of using and understanding possibilities afforded by new technologies and make sure they can integrate them into daily work activities. Whether it’s mastery of tools like Gen AI or Agentic AI or future-ready strategy development and foresight planning, the modern workforce will require candidates highly capable in using skills like critical thinking, troubleshooting, simulations and scenario planning and crisis management. Because so much of our work and production infrastructure will increasingly be run by technological elements (robots, computers, information from massive data centres and data farms), the critical, invaluable role of people in the work equation (sometimes referred to as coboting) will be in contingency planning, i.e., what do we do if our data centre goes down? What happens if a regional conflict blocks a supply route? Our Industry 5.0 workforce will be future-ready and have an answer on hand to deal with any trouble spots.

Is Industry 5.0 a vehicle for successfully riding out current disruptions?

Knowing that the skills sets above will be incredibly useful for human-machine collaboration, I believe that one of the greatest values of this new era will come in the form of helping us build more resilient teams of workers. I know that my colleagues in the sales domain are constantly assessing and rethinking how do we demonstrate the value that new products and new processes have for our clients and customers. I believe that Industry 5.0’s increased focus on the people element can make overall processes and work approaches better: not just in terms of greater efficiencies, but also by making us work smarter and more empathetically. In the automotive industry this will involve ensuring that we deliver products and services that fit personal (human) goals and not only loftier ideals. If you have tools like 3D printing you can use this for personalised parts prototyping, you can use AI-driven process monitoring to refine and improve supply chains, or leverage predictive analytics to plan inventories – the overall message is that tech will work for humans to make their jobs and workspaces safer, more comfortable and more welcoming.

So the question now is "Are we ready to enter into this human-machine marriage?" Will 2025 be the year that people-cobot collaboration really takes off? This is a moment where we can put aside our fears and concerns and push forward in getting to the other side of massive process disruptions and arrive in a modernised world of work (in the auto sector, for example) where products and services thrive in a modern, circular and sustainable reality that is beneficial to employees and employers alike.