A key policy goal of President Donald Trump’s administration is bringing jobs back to American factories, though the effort has been mired in a years-long slog despite support from both Democratic and Republican administrations.
But even beyond the challenge of getting large, multinational companies to reroute their complex supply chains, there’s a large and unsolved skills gap problem to address even if these U.S. manufacturing jobs were to proliferate. Peter Koerte, the chief technology officer and chief strategy officer at German technology conglomerate Siemens AG, points to research that shows that the average tenure of a U.S. manufacturing worker has slipped from 20 years in 2019 to just 3 years in 2023.
“Which means that most of the people that you find—and in particular if we want to bring back manufacturing to the United States—they’re unskilled,” says Koerte. “Because nobody wants to have a factory job.”
Official government figures are less dire, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that the median tenure of a manufacturing worker dropped from 5.9 years in 2014 to 4.9 years a decade later. But regardless, manufacturing workers are coming to work each day with a lot less expertise than those who worked similar jobs decades ago.
This led Siemens to launch a pilot program in 2024 for an industrial-focused AI copilot, helping engineering teams to search Siemens manuals in natural language to troubleshoot problems on the factory floor. This year, the company expanded the effort by launching an industrial foundational model that was specifically designed for industrial applications.
As an example, this AI tool can be used by a worker who is trying to figure out what to do when a machine breaks down. The employee can input information about the machine and the error code that’s on display, and then retrieve detailed instructions on how to address the issue. Less downtime for machines saves factories time and money. The use of AI in this manner also democratizes engineering expertise.
“You don’t need to have the very deep domain know-how that prevents you from using those systems,” says Koerte. “It levels the playing field.”
Koerte has had a long career at Siemens, joining the company in 2007 as a corporate strategist and taking on several leadership roles before ascending to the CTO and CSO titles in 2020. He says he’s remained at Siemens for such a large portion of his career because he’s inspired by the company’s ability to continually reinvent itself over its 178-year history.
Siemens began as a telecommunications company that built the infrastructure that made it possible to send a telegram from London to Calcutta in just 28 minutes, a momentous breakthrough in the mid-1800s. Today, Siemens is known for selling machinery and software that support massive industries including the power and gas sectors, healthcare, and building and freight projects, ranging from supporting a 2,000-kilometer high-speed railway that’s being built in Egypt to an automotive Mercedes-Benz plant in Berlin. The advancement of generative AI presents yet another opportunity for reinvention, says Koerte.
