Rockwell Automation’s $2 Billion Bet on the Future of Smart Manufacturing - Blake Moret, Chairman and CEO of Rockwell Automation

This is The TechEd Podcast, where we feature leaders who are shaping, innovating, and disrupting technical education and the workforce. These are the stories of organizations leading the charge to change education to rethink the workforce and to embrace emerging technology. You'll find us here every Tuesday on our mission to secure the American dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. And now here's your host, Matt Kirchner.

Welcome into The TechEd Podcast. I am your host Matt Kirchner, with a really, really special guest joining us today. As we were starting this podcast up, and it's been now some five plus years, 270 some odd episodes, as we record this one, and now become the number one podcast in STEM and technical education in a top-ranked technology podcast around the globe, none of it could have happened without some of those really early guests that came on, took a chance on us, people with a really high profile.

My theory was, if we could get some really well-known people on in the first 10 episodes, as we went out to other guests and asked them to join us on the podcast, they would say, well, if it's good enough for that person, it must be good enough for me, and it worked exactly right. We've had governors and members of Congress, and we've had 2530 plus Fortune 500 CEOs, lots of folks doing amazing work in the in the world of STEM and technical education, but one of the very first guests, in fact, it was all the way back, I believe, in February of 2020 of 2021 was Blake Moret, the chairman and CEO of Rockwell Automation, our audience, I'm sure many of them know Rockwell is just an absolute behemoth in the world of industrial automation, advanced manufacturing.

So, to have the chairman and CEO of such an amazing company on with us for the second time is a real blessing. So much has changed over the course of those five plus years since we last had our conversation on the podcast, Blake Moret. So we're really excited to be getting into the advancements that are happening at Rockwell, the huge investments you're making in national manufacturing and here in the United States, which is really, really considerable. The work that you're doing with the National Association of Manufacturers, all of that and more in this episode of The TechEd Podcast.

But let me just start out by welcoming you back. It's great to have you, Matt. My pleasure to be here. So, let's, you know, I'm going to start with these investments that you're making, and I live here in the city of Milwaukee, lifelong Milwaukee, and by the way, or at least in suburban Milwaukee.

So, I was born here, I was, I grew up here, went to high school, college here, ran manufacturing companies here in the state of Wisconsin, now doing things in education. I mean, what your organization means to our community is incredible. What your organization means to the world of US manufacturing is incredible. And now here we are, and I've had a business relationship with your company, as you know, for decades, 30 some odd years, and you're making just an unbelievable investment here in the United States of America, and particularly in some cases, here in the state of Wisconsin, when we think about a number like $2 billion over five years, it's almost mind-boggling, right?

Did you ever think that you'd be investing that kind of money here in the United States? And tell our audience a little bit about, you know, what's happening with the plants, what you know, what you're doing in the world, that digital manufacturing, smart technology, now artificial intelligence, what's driving this $2 billion investment? Well, at a high level, it's to increase customer value, customer service, and from a financial standpoint to be able to expand our profitability as well by doing things really efficiently.

In other words, the same thing that we sell our technology to customers to help them do, and it's putting our money where our mouth is in our own operations, you know. We're a successful, prosperous company today, but we know there's so much more that we can do. Everybody is at a certain point in their journey to, you know, more complete implementation of industrial automation. You know, almost all of our customers, including us, are talking about, you know, digital transformation, being able to do the things that help provide efficiency in the production space, and to be able to have that produce meaningful benefits in terms of revenue growth and margin expansion, you know, in our financial results as well, and so the investment that we're making primarily in the areas of plant talent and digital infrastructure, so in terms of plant, that kind of the headline is, you know, a green field that we're going to be building just west of Milwaukee and New Berlin, Wisconsin, but also the investments we're making in our existing facilities.

We have a highly automated line downtown in Milwaukee, Twinsburg, Ohio. Today is our. Most valuable, you know, plant in the system. We have a big facility just across the street from where we are now, right, Mequon, Wisconsin, Richland Center.

And so, being able to add our technology, technology of our partners, making sure our workforce is engaged and enabled, you know, to interact with that technology that's going to produce huge benefits in terms of customer service as well as efficiency for us, talent, you know, again, talent that is comfortable interacting with the technology that can talk about what we can do for customers in terms of providing them the technology to model their operations and digital twins to be able to simulate production, de-bottleneck it without running the first physical product through it, and having a workforce, you know, commercial technical product development that can keep pace with that is going to be a really important part of our share gains and our success over the next few years, and then finally making sure that our own digital infrastructure, the business system, you know, that was right for us, let's say 20 years ago, is not going to be adequate today, and making sure we're making the investments in a, you know, an AI first, you know, business system throughout our organization, so that we can serve customers, whether they're buying hardware, software, services, or, as is most often the case, some combination that's going to be a big recipient of our investment dollars going forward, you know, I remember as a supplier to Rockwell now, some 20 years ago, about that same time, working through an ERP transformation, then, and, and thinking about all the benefits that a good, solid, well-integrated ERP system can bring to an organization, and now hearing you talk about how, yes, that's still really, really important, but the technology of 20 years ago isn't necessarily going to be, and probably won't be the technology of the future, and you start thinking about some of these enterprise-wide AI transformations, and we'll get into that in a little bit.

It's just amazing where some of this technology has come. I love the fact that you started with the idea of, look, you know, in the end, we're a for-profit business, we need to provide a return for shareholders, we need to make sure that we're, that we're doing a great job for the people that have invested in our organization, but also for talent, also for operational excellence, also for customers. Those are not, those are not ors, they're ands, and they're all, you know, co equal results of each other.

So I like the way that you're, you're thinking about that, and now you're talking about this, this million square foot investment in New Berlin, which is about, you know, 20 minutes, I would say, give or take from your headquarters in downtown Milwaukee, a million square feet, and you're calling it the factory of the future. Paint a picture for our audience of what does the factory of the future look like. You mentioned digital twins, I'm sure there's AMR, collaborative robots, I mean, you know, humanoids, I mean, what does the factory of the future look like?

Well, we can, we have the ability, since it's going to be a green field, to be able to lay it out in an optimal way to make sure that by design we're reducing tack, you know, time between different processes, so that we can have as efficient a process as possible, because when you have a circuitous route that you know products have to take just because you've got, you know, you have what you have, you know, in a factory that's built up over 20 or 30 years, those delays, and you know the need for accumulation, where you have mismatches and production speeds, you know, attract cost, and so right from the start, looking at ways to lay out the factory, and as you said, you know, with the assistance of mobile robots, which we now manufacture ourselves, you know, being able to apply right from the start, you know, MES software that helps, you know, chart the ideal path, and in fact, you know, working internally to merge those for a more comprehensive orchestration system for product flow, plus, you know, manufacturing instructions, you know, those are the types of things that a lot of people are talking about today, and a lot of people are talking about it from the AI down.

We have an opportunity that we can certainly apply artificial intelligence and advanced cloud native technologies, but we also have the domain expertise, and we think that puts us in a unique spot to add value in our own operations and to take customers along the journey. We're going to be talking about here's why we made the decisions we did in terms of how we laid out the facility, the application of technology as kind of a little bit of a reference for our customers who were at their own unique point in their own manufacturing journey, and I, you know, there's so many interesting things that you just highlighted there, Blake.

But you know, I want to, I want to think about for a moment, I think back to my years in manufacturing facilities, and you know, early on, when we were driving performance improvement in the, you know, metal finishing facility, metal fabrication, machining, what have you, and it was literally like an industrial engineer with a clipboard and a stopwatch, and going out to the line, watching it, you know, we all studied W Edwards Deming, we were all fans of Joe Duran, Taichi Ono, Gold Rat, and the theory of constraints, and so on.

And you'd go out and find your bottlenecks in your manufacturing plant, and if you could figure out what that constraint was, you'd put effort into understanding how you could mitigate it and how you could take care of that bottleneck. Then it was on to the next bottleneck to one of your comments in our earlier question about now being able to digitally identify bottlenecks, and in this case, now doing it before you ever build a plant, and one of the things that I hadn't thought about, which was really prescient in terms of how you worded it, is being able to start on the domain side, and we're so much, we're so focused now on artificial intelligence, on cloud-based technology, on creating data lakes and Dataverses and MCP servers and agentic AI, and I mean all of that has a huge value, and it's going to be a huge part of advancing manufacturing, but in the end it's those manufacturing technologies at the edge, at the domain, whether it's, you know, whether it's ladder logic, whether it's a PLC, whether it's smart sensors and smart devices, material handling, material flow, conveyors, I mean, that, that is, that is why we're doing the AI in the first place.

So, I just have to comment on the fact that I love that philosophy. Let's build this from the ground up. It's a greenfield facility, we can literally create this in that most optimal way, and then deploy AI and machine learning and other technologies to that to that solution. But in the end, it's all about tech time, it's all about cycle time, it's all about yield, it's all about production, it's about matching, you know, manufacturing capacity to demand, and that's what the future manufacturing is going to be, even though we're now using a lot of these advanced manufacturing technologies.

Are you seeing it the same way? Yeah, and I would add that it's, it's scalable, and that, you know, when we think about the factory, the future, we think about this, you know, full factory, but it starts at, you know, the more, let's say, molecular level, working with individual machine builders, and as you said, material handling, you know, to bring these together, because if you don't have the receptivity at the individual machine to these technologies, you know, starting with just the basic communications.

A lot of these machines, you know, in real plants today don't have all the connectivity that you would like to have, so making sure that it's ready to be integrated in that you can take composable digital twins of individual machines and bring them together in a plant-wide view, you know. Sometimes using Omniverse, for instance, you know, to be able to get the photorealistic renderings, you know, of these facilities where the emulation software is running the actual code, right?

You know, that's being run on these machines, de bottleneck it that way, rather than, you know, walking around with a clipboard, and saying, "Boy, there's a lot of accumulation here. Maybe you know someday we could get rid of some of that, but to be able to do that digitally, you know, before you're actually running physical material, that's happening. And I'd say, you know, it's one of the byproducts of the pandemic, where everybody couldn't be, you know, shoulder to shoulder, you know, together physically in the same plant, we had the remote technologies, they accelerated during that time, and they've kept going.

I think the frontier today is using those emulation technologies beyond just the initial commissioning event, keep it from becoming shelfware after that, and being able to use it, and constantly looking at ways to increase the efficiency of a running plant, and certainly as you're bringing in new machinery, and so on. Absolutely, one of the things when we talk to manufacturers, especially small to mid-sized businesses, but any manufacturer who's saying, How do I deploy AI? How do I deploy smart technology?

And I tell them, start at the machine tool, you know, your machine tool builder now, that if they're, if they're any good, and so many of them are, are already embedding their, their manufacturing equipment with a ton of smart technology. So we've got smart sensors and devices that have the ability to process information, make decisions on the edge, communicate with each other without necessarily having to go up to a computer network or even a PLC, in some cases, although PLC, of course, still plays an incredible role, and will be aggregating the information from these sensors and devices, but but start at the machine tool, and then, and then figure it out from there, because a lot of, lot of opportunities, if you're buying a new machining center, you're buying a new metal fabrication press, if you're buying, you know, if you're buying new equipment, it's going to have that technology already embedded on it, maybe even some software that exists to help you utilize that technology to improve throughput and yield, and so on, you know, you talked about this brand new greenfield operation in New Berlin, and I'm so excited, if I can be the first.

Were on the first tour that I would love to love an invitation that's going to be so cool, but to your earlier point, you've got legacy facilities as well that are really, really important part of your supply chain, really important part of your organization. How are you thinking about changing those and modifying those in this age of AI to make sure they're still relevant? Well, you know, I think about, I'll take for an example, one of the facilities that was earliest to adopt some of, you know, the new technologies in Singapore, and we've seen dramatic improvements, really, in labor efficiency, and that's not, you know, reducing people in the facility as much as it is making sure that we, as we grow and our output grows, we can do it as efficiency as efficiently as possible, implementing technologies, you know, like we talk about, you know, credentialed education, be able to reduce the time it takes for somebody to become competent when they hire on, and that's a really important thing, and then energy consumption, and so those are some of the tangible values that we've seen, and that certainly our customers are looking for as well.

In Twinsburg, Ohio, it's going to be adopting a lot of those similar technologies, but we continue to learn, implementing mobile robots, being able to, you know, take some of the software that we've more recently acquired or developed, Factory Talk Optics, for instance, Edge, you know, data management, right, the concept of Resilient Edge, so that, yeah, we have certain applications that run on the cloud, but if we lose connectivity, we can still run our operations, because we have it at the edge as well, and so there's a lot of those things in those facilities, and I would say Rockwell, if I think about the Rockwell of 20 or 30 years ago, and I was part of the company at that time, we were great at very high volume, relatively low mix types of operations.

A lot of manufacturing today still has a lot of people involved, a lot of variability, and I'd say the technologies that we have make us much more capable of addressing manufacturing problems, you know, in those sorts of facilities as well. And so we're implementing it in our own operations, where we still have a lot of people in our operations, and helping increase the efficiency of those people, and the technology, you know, is really where the opportunity lies. And I think you hit on a key opportunity for not just Rockwell, but for manufacturers in general.

I think, in personal example of our two companies, one of a former company that I ran in Rockwell Automation, as you know, and I think our audience probably knows, because I mentioned it probably every third episode. For 10 years, I ran a spin off of Rockwell Automation from 1998 to 2008 and it just amazed me. I still think back on this when we think about a SKU. You certainly know what a SKU is, for our audience benefit, an individual part, so you might have, you know, 20 parts that go into an assembly, 50 parts that go into an assembly.

Every one of those individual parts would be called a skew. We had 14,000 different skews for Rockwell Automation that we ran through one plant, and some of those, to your point, were, you know, really high volume, low mix, where you're running, you know, 10,000 or something, or 100,000 or something. A lot of them were, you know, some maybe a replacement part or something. We've got five contactors that we have to run through a tin plating line or something like that.

That is high volume, low mix. And one of the challenges in automation, I think, historically, I know that don't just think, is you know, if you've got the same part running through a facility day after day after day, you create the same day every day. It's really easy, not easy, but relatively easy to automate, much simpler. If you've got a situation where your product mix is different coming into your facility every single day, and in some cases you're running just a handful of things, lots harder to automate.

I start thinking about some of the work that companies like Gray Matt or Robotics are doing, and I know Rockwell is focused on this as well. Where now we can automate processes, thanks to AI, thanks to vision systems, and thanks to some of these advancing technologies in lot sizes as small as one. I think that's one of the huge advancements we're going to see in manufacturing. So, I'm really, really glad that you mentioned that.

So, just a message, and I say this over and over and over again to manufacturing. I don't want to hear any more I'm high mix, low volume. I can't automate that. Those days are over.

There are ways to automate your manufacturing facilities. That's coming from me. You can agree or disagree, but I think that's a, that's a huge opportunity. Well, I think one of the unlocks is the integration with robotics.

You know, for most of my decades long career, when I try to explain, you know, what it is that Rockwell does. You know, the first response from somebody not in the industry is, "Oh, like robots? Well, not really, but today, you know, we, we make robots ourselves, in terms of the mobile robots, but a. Big part of the effort is the more seamless integration with the arms, with the articulated arms taken place, Scara, so on robots, and that enables a lot more of the agility, the customization, getting closer to, you know, an economic order quantity of one.

Absolutely, whereas we see a lot of schools now teaching on, you know, as you know, I'm particular to Fanuc, but lots of great, lots of great robotics companies out there, but we love Fanuc. I know you've got a great partnership with Fanuc, but teaching the integration of a, you know, a Rockwell automation Allen Bradley control system with with a six axis industrial robot, literally doing that in high school, where they're they're building up the control box, they're installing the PLC, they're doing all the wiring terminations, and then connecting that to a Fanuc robot.

So, just, just, you're hearing right here from the Chairman and CEO of Rockwell Automation the importance of these kind of skills in the integration of control systems and robotics and automation. You've also mentioned your investment in AMRs a couple times as well. So, the vision in acquiring a company called Auto Autonomous Mobile Robots. You're now building the Auto 600 right here in downtown Milwaukee.

Tremendous amounts of embedded artificial intelligence there, from, you know, lidar systems, cameras, onboard micro processing, you know, cloud-based software that helps automate material flow through an entire operation. I mean, that really is the future of manufacturing. Well, it's the one offering we have that already has GPUs, right? You know, it's a big enough data set, as you talk about the AMR scheduling and the fleet management, that you know we're already using GPUs on board, you know, certain models of the auto.

The biggest strategic reason that we went there was the opportunity for, as I mentioned earlier, more comprehensive orchestration, so we have some pretty good MES offerings for the fixed automation, you know, the, you know, fixed machinery, conveyors, diverters, you know, order scheduling, but to be able to combine that with the material flow in what we've called production logistics, bringing material to the line, being able to take finished product away from the palletizer to the loading dock or to the warehouse, the opportunity to bring that all together is something that we have a head start on, we have the building blocks and the expertise, and again, there's some other people going after this from a kind of a top down, hey, we've, you know, got a lot of smart people who understand AI, but we think that we can implement this in maybe the most practical way, focusing, you know, on the priority use cases that are going to deliver value the fastest, and that's exactly what this is all about.

We, it's the same thing, you know, we're in the lean manufacturing days, and I did a ton of lean events, ton of Kaizen events. You know, people would say, well, we want to, you know, come in and we want to do a Kaizen event, and it's like, for what, you know, what problem are we trying to solve here, right? And we see so many folks saying, well, we need to be doing AI, you know, at the enterprise level, or what have you, and it's like, well, what's the use case? What's the what are we trying to improve?

How is this going to benefit the customer? How is this going to drive profitability? So, I think you're asking all the right questions in terms of of how AI can transform manufacturing, and then we start to think about where all this is going. So, you know, I've been an advocate for Industry 4.

0 for a long time. You know, I speak on it all the time. We're calling it different things now, in some cases, but the whole idea of a digital twin was something, and you've mentioned it a couple times, to be able to emulate, to be able to de-bottleneck manufacturing operations using, you know, using enterprise-wide software, using artificial intelligence, using MES, and so on, I was having a conversation a week or two ago, and I hope he was okay in telling me this. In fact, I'm sure he was, but Michael Cook, who you and I both know very well, is really the face of Rockwell automation when it comes to education, whether that's university partnerships, technical college projects, advocacy in the high schools across literally globally.

Michael is doing great things in education, so credit to Michael. He's a great friend, a great supporter of so many things that we're doing here at the podcast. Michael led on to me that one of the things that Rockwell is starting to think about is digital twinning, not just a manufacturing operation, right? So, not just saying, okay, here is our manufacturing operation, we're going to create an exact digital twin of that, that we are going to be able to de bottleneck it, that we're going to be able to innovate on it, that it's going to get smarter and smarter over time as the physical asset is running and educating the digital twin.

Fascinating on its own, he started talking about what if we could digital twin an entire enterprise, what if it wasn't just that manufacturing facility, what if it's our entire supply chain. What if it's financial performance? What if it's driving margin? What if it's understanding throughput, understanding how all these manufacturing operations are connecting together.

And if I could literally sit here at, let's say, at the end of 2026 and emulate my entire financial performance for 2027 with an incredible amount of precision, he mentioned that this was the kind of thing. You're thinking about, I mean, talk about that. Are we going to get to a point where we can digitally twin an entire enterprise? Yeah, I think I think we'll be able to create models with increasing levels of fidelity.

Now, let me start by saying Rockwell won't do that on our own, right? We've got some strong partners, and as a pure play, it's important for us to recognize the things that we're really good at and the things that we should work with partners like Microsoft and Nvidia, you know, Cisco, Fanuc, you know, and a bunch of others, and when we start talking about big grand problems like that, you know, that's an important part of it for us to lend, you know, our knowledge and capabilities where we can go deep and then recognize where, where we should be working with partners as well, but increasingly, I mean, we've talked about the convergence of it and OT for a long time, and you know, there's not an air gap that exists between the manufacturing, the carpeted and the uncarpeted parts of the enterprise, and so it's natural that we'll see more and more simulations that extend beyond just the make facility.

I mean, we're already talking about this production logistics idea that extends into the warehouse, and we have some technology solutions, we have expertise that can be applied to that, but being able to lend our capabilities to others to be able to create those simulations is real opportunities. Forecasting, for instance, you know, that's a big one, that, of course, spans, you know, it, OT, and is a critical input to the financial performance of an enterprise, being able to, you know, determine, do you have enough capacity?

Are you going to be able to maintain customer service in a way that you know maintains or grows share? And then, you know, how does that link directly into the forecasting capabilities that drive, you know, a lot of what the finance folks are interested in. It's going to be so exciting to watch that roll out. You know, I've got, and I've mentioned it a couple times on the podcast, separate ed tech companies that we're involved with are using, you know, Azure, Azure Data Factory for Microsoft, and some other tools, creating APIs from a bunch of different data sources, and now projecting EBITDA, or you know, net cash flow 14 months out, plus or minus 1.

5% just using inputs and outputs, and, and I say to people, How much more risk can you take in a business with your cash you have today if you know from now until the middle of next year how those businesses are going to perform, and that's really how we have to start thinking, I think, in manufacturing in American business, about not just looking over our shoulder at what happened last month, not just looking at this month and seeing where we're going to end up, but how are we going to be doing literally a year and a half from now, or maybe five and 10 years from now, using some of this emulation technology is going to be really, really exciting.

You mentioned some great partners in Rockwell, certainly none of us do any of this alone, and I want to get into some of that a little bit now, in terms of this incredible - I'm not supposed to use the word ecosystem anymore, but this incredible ecosystem of customers that you have and partners that you have is Rockwell Automation. I can tell you that there are a couple publications that I look forward to seeing every single year. One of them is your State of Smart Manufacturing Report, and literally, I mean, going back, it's now the 11th edition of this, and you're polling customers, you're polling partners, and asking them about where are we with smart manufacturing, and 11 years ago, so that would have been 2015 people maybe were talking about smart manufacturing, certainly didn't have an understanding of what it is the way that they do today, but you're getting these incredible insights that are coming from your smart manufacturing report, so one of the things that we pulled away, and I want to make sure I get this right, so I'm actually looking at my notes at the moment.

You talk about things like artificial intelligence and machine learning, and those are now outranking all these other technologies, so they're out ranking robotics, collaborative robotics, they're out ranking things like autonomous mobile robots that we've already talked about. When manufacturers say these are the things that we are looking at, AI and machine learning is at the very top of the list. Why would you say that is? And what's changed over the course of the last couple of years that's driving that interest?

I think it's the promise of those technologies to simplify what goes on in automation and manufacturing, the ability to interact with development tools and natural language, rather than old languages, you know, that are developed specifically for those tasks, but to be able to, you know, interact with the technology, to have it draw on libraries of, you know, code, to be able to compose the useful instructions for designing not just the programs, but the way that you know pieces of technology come together to be able to commission it, you know, was probably the most notable task of creating digital twins and emulating, you know, the operation of various pieces.

Of machinery, and then to be able to operate it and maintain it. It's that simplification that I think AI can provide. Machine learning has certainly been a part of our technology for a long, long time, and the idea that equipment can become more performant, you know, even after it passes the site acceptance test, you know, all the machinery manufacturers are recognizing that opportunity, and they're having to hustle to update their business models for that as well. I think it's due, you know, to maybe two related one is the increasing differentiation of their machinery that comes from the software, and second, it is the incorporation of artificial intelligence, so we can learn, you know, shift to shift, you know, how can we, you know, shave off time to move from, you know, one shift to the next shift without, you know, having a ramp in production or a trough in production, and I think those are the types of problems that are being addressed today with those technologies, and why it's captured the imagination of the respondents to the state of smart manufacturing survey.

You know, I read an article, Blake, not too long ago about Open AI, saying now literally 100% of their coding is being done by artificial intelligence. By the way, the message should not be that we don't need to be teaching Python, that we don't need to be teaching, you know, other other programming languages, because that's still really, really important. But you know, to kind of bring that to the manufacturing world, and to make sure I understand, I'm pretty sure I did, where you started with that, that last answer, you know, in my manufacturing days, if you know, if I needed to reprogram a fanic robot, all right, Who can program in Carol?

Who understands that language? If I needed to address something that was going on in my control system, who, you know, who knows Ladder Logic, who knows RS 5000 how do we, you know, how do we get that problem solved? If I needed somebody to work, you know, patch a homegrown ERP system, you know, who's my Unix expert? Right, that was the world we lived in.

And now we're getting to a point where, if we're proficient with artificial intelligence, it's less and less about being able to program in a specific language and more about what I want that particular piece of equipment to do. Is that.. is that.. am I saying the right?

Yeah, I think it's not going to happen overnight. Personally, I know today, you know, Studio 5000 is the standard, you know, for programming, for the design time, you know, for logics, for instance, but we have a rapidly increasing, you know, base of Avid users of Factory Talk Design Studio, which has an embedded co-pilot, we're adding, you know, agents, you know, regularly to those technologies to be able to make it easier and easier to compose, you know, new programs without having to go in and decode every line, you know, rung of ladder logic, right?

And you know, I think that's going to be a huge productivity enabler for the systems that's on the design side, and then you have on the run side, you know, being able to incorporate AI that's constantly looking at learning from the repetition of, you know, the production runs, and being able to create a more performance system as well. And this, by the way, is why I'm such a big advocate for, yes, we need to understand generative pre-trained transformers. You need to know how to prompt Chat GPT, perplexity, meta AI, and whatever platform you're using, but also on the machine learning side, for students to understand what is reinforcement learning.

What do we need? What do we talk.. what do we mean when we talk about structured and unstructured data, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, classification learning, which of course is really, really important from the standpoint of vision systems and quality, and so on, and manufacturing, so making sure that people have a really good understanding not just of the AI side but of the subset of AI known as machine learning, which has so many different applications in manufacturing.

Yeah, and just to, just to reinforce that, I visited Milwaukee School of Engineering just a few weeks ago, and you know, listening to what some of their freshmen and sophomore students have already learned, and obviously they get a lot of support from, you know, some of the giants in the industry, but just amazing, and to your point, getting a very, you know, deep understanding of the foundational concepts that are going to serve them well for their whole careers. A great example of how we're getting students in at every level of education prepared for this next era of manufacturing, and the industry partnerships, including that with Rockwell Automation, that are driving so much of the innovation that's happening in education.

I want to turn now a little bit to cyber security, you mentioned the IT OT convergence. I love the term of the carpeted and non-carpeted areas of the plant. Did you come up with that on your own, or did you, did you get that somewhere else? 30 years ago, I mean, that's that's absolutely perfect.

And, and there was, as much as in the my years in manufacturing, you wanted to make sure you were driving in a. Operation and collaboration between shop floor supervisors, maintenance technicians, maintenance supervisors, machine operators, machine tenders, and the people in the front office, whether it was a, you know, operations VP or a CEO or purchasing manager, supply chain VP, whatever, really, really important, that was a goal before, it's an absolute necessity today, right, especially as we're thinking about you mentioned air gapping, you know, the plant and the office.

Well, in the past, our manufacturing plants were all air-gapped, right? So, cybersecurity, intellectual property security, I'm not saying it was easy, but it was a lot easier when some bad actor couldn't get into your network from the outside and actually go into, you know, if they know, knew how to do it, go into a program, understand what your secret IP was, something like that. Really, really important. Now, turning back to the State of Smart Manufacturing report, 46% of manufacturers, it said, experienced a cyber incident in the last year with high vulnerability in IT, OT, and for our audience, it information technology, OT operations technology, operational technology.

Those people never wanted to have anything to do with each other 1015 years ago, right? If it came to the shop floor, you know, you'd turn around and ran away. Now again, you know, they need to continue to integrate together. You know, how should manufacturers be thinking about cybersecurity?

And what are your thoughts on how Rockwell can play a part in making sure that companies are keeping their intellectual property theirs well. It has to be a comprehensive approach that spans, as you said, it and OT, and in fact, you know one of the current focus areas is granted the OT environment is different, the diversity of the inputs and outputs, the, you know, critical nature of what goes on there. You can't be down to, you know, patch things in the middle of a production run, and so on, but to have it type, you know, user experience, you know, to be able to sort out, you know, various alarms or identification of vulnerabilities in a way that's digestible, you know, by a person you know, so that they can take the right prioritized action, or some of the same issues, you know, in the IT space, and so being able to have more of a common front end, regardless of whether you're looking at vulnerabilities or threats or incidences, in the worst case in the OT environment or the IT environment, but establishing some commonality there.

I don't think I have to emphasize, you know, to most of your listeners, you know, the importance of it. It's a board level discussion, you know, in every board meeting that I'm in, whether it's in groups of manufacturers, or you know, within Rockwell, but being able to be the hardest possible target, and you know, eternal vigilance, that's just where we are, and certainly introduction of artificial intelligence tools that you know not only the good guys can use, but you know also the hackers is just going to be a fact of life, that's one of the points that I like to make to folks, and why we're pushing so hard for AI innovation education.

Certainly, we need to have guardrails, but making sure that those aren't so constraining, because the truth of the matter is that the bad actors are going to figure it out, and so as long as people of good conscience are also figuring it out and staying one step ahead. I think the future is bright. As soon as we stop investing in how we use any kind of technology from a cybersecurity standpoint to make sure, as you say, make, make that target as hard as possible, force them to go someplace else to to attack an organization or to steal IP.

Super, super important. And in two other, you know, points. It's not all about, you know, the Hollywood-esque, you know, exploitation of really exotic vulnerabilities. You know, it's also about just the basics, you know.

Don't leave, you know, your OT networks exposed, you know, on the internet, right, with limited, you know, firewalls or other forms of protection. Make sure that you're paying attention to insider risk, which you know figures in an astonishingly high, you know, majority of cases, whether it's unintentional or you know a disgruntled employee. So, there's some basic stuff that all of us can do that can be just as important as you know, reacting to the zero day threats as well. Exactly, I've been on boards of companies that had, you know, cyber, cyber attacks, ransomware, it, you know, it's incredible how that can, it can absolutely bring a company to its knees.

And literally, I mean, there's, there's companies now that are building ransomware payments right into their budgets, so that they can continue operations, so protecting ourselves from as many of those threats as possible, super, super important, and I'm glad that we had the operation, or the opportunity, I should say, to touch on that. One more question on the smart manufacturing report, and it really speaks to, you know, I spent - maybe you know this, maybe you don't - but I spent a week in China last August.

August with Todd Wannick, who's the chief executive officer of Ashley Furniture Industries, and Todd and I visited 26 tech companies in, in six days. We did a great episode on the podcast last, last late last year. We'll link that up in the show notes, but it was really eye opening for me to spend that that kind of time with technology companies in China. One of the things that we took away from the smart manufacturing report is the whole idea of competitive differentiation, and the report showed a huge difference between China and the United States, where you at the US is responding to AI and cybersecurity risks by hiring and upskilling people by bringing in consultants to help them make sure they're hardening the target, nobody's going to argue with that China is really busy digitizing their businesses, adapting technology, adapting automation.

There's some, some great book, a book. Have you read the book Breakneck by Dan Wong? I don't know if you've seen that or not. It's worth a read, talking about kind of the culture in the United States around compliance and, and lawyers in the culture in China around innovation and engineering, and so many members of Xi's Politburo being being engineers by background.

He's a chemical engineer by background. In what do you make of this difference between how China is thinking about some of these things and about how the US is thinking about them? And is there a message for the US and the smart manufacturing report we need to be thinking about? Well, I think adoption speed is, you know, always something that we've been concerned about, and recognizing that, you know, we are in a globally competitive environment.

The US, you know, has high labor costs, and that's not going to change, but we can still compete and win as US manufacturers, but only with the proper sense of urgency and mandate to be able to adopt new technologies, like you mean it, not as a hobby, not as a, you know, to be able to check a box and get through the next meeting, but to do it, to look for, you know, the opportunities for competitive advantage to adopt new technologies like you mean it. I'm going to steal that from you.

I'll credit you with that three times, and then just take it. But I love that about adopting new technologies like you mean it. Super, super important for manufacturers here in the United States. I know you're a huge advocate for global manufacturing, even a bigger advocate for US manufacturing.

Part of that advocacy is, and I want to make sure our audience catches this. You are now chairing the board of the National Association of Manufacturers, so the largest manufacturing trade association in the entire United States speaks with a huge voice on policy, on best practices, on economic development, on on sound manufacturing work, and sound manufacturing results in your chairing that board now, so talk a little bit about some of your priorities as you chair the NAM board.

Well, look, it's it's a signature honor for me. I've spent my whole career over 40 years in manufacturing, and so the opportunity to lead that organization over 11,000 members of the National Association of Manufacturers. Some of the key issues are, as you would expect, tariffs, right, and the need for more certainty with respect to the cost base with which we deal. It's important to note, I think, as well, that I'm not just representing the big multinational companies that are part of the NAM, but you know, the majority of the membership is small and medium-sized manufacturers reflecting America, right?

Yeah, absolutely right, absolutely right. So, tariffs permitting reform, being able to get, get projects, you know, into production just as quickly as possible. Advanced manufacturing technology, you know, everybody recognizes that the combination of, again, an engaged and enabled workforce with the technology is going to be the winning hand across all of the different types of production disciplines that the membership recognizes. My opportunity is to make sure that the voice of those manufacturers can complement the professionals in the NAM who understand, you know, the Washington environment and how laws you know are written, and so on to bring those two, you know, very different areas together, but that really creates the unique voice of the NAM.

So, all these years back in when you were a student at Georgia Tech, did you ever dream that you'd be leading, you know, a Fortune 500 company like Rockwell, that you'd be the head of the largest trade association for manufacturing? I mean, do you ever think this would be your life? You know, I did not. I mean, a year after I got out of Georgia Tech, I wrote a submission to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers on the factory of the future.

You know, what will it look like? And I got a few things right, not everything for sure, but what's one key thing that was in that paper that you're like, 'Wow, I was way ahead.' On this one, you know, I think you know the importance going forward of distributed parcel delivery, you know, UPS and FedEx were around, but this was way, way before Amazon, and the idea that you know you would be able to have, you know, very targeted high-performance delivery of, you know, packages and that logistics was really going to move the importance of safety on the factory floor.

You know, those things were probably, were probably right. Something that I missed, and it's relevant to, you know, my role in the NAM is the importance of public policy in catalyzing manufacturing, and that's something that you know, as a 2324 year old, I would have been oblivious to, but it's always fun to think about, you know, not just where manufacturing was then and what we're seeing now, but thinking about where we are now and where it's all going. I know that that's an important part of the World Economic Forum work that you're doing as well, and you were on a panel, World Economic forum panel talking about the importance of upskilling the next generation, so talk about the World Economic Forum, and particularly this idea of finding a million students, a million young people, and getting them excited about the kind of careers you and I are talking about here in advanced manufacturing.

Yeah, that was probably talking about the Smart Start curriculum, which you know, at least initially targeted at high schools, but you know the importance of lifelong learning, starting early, you know, and allowing people to continue to acquire skills for what's, you know, current, currently needed through a career that can last, you know, 40 plus years, that's really important, and for people to, you know, develop an affinity for, you know, the business of making things, applying, you know, the technologies that they're hearing about, that they see on their phones, and so on, in the production space, and be able to draw the linkage.

There is really important for the future manufacturing, and again, you know, the role of the WEF is it's an international stage, bringing together public companies, manufacturers, governments, the public space, employee unions too, right, unions, and also academia. Sure, and so you know it's kind of a neat, a neat stage to be able to advance those ideas, absolutely. Well, and there again, it's just an example of your incredible leadership, and the ability to to work on these projects at the absolute highest level of the of the world economy has to be super, super rewarding.

We are in a world economy that none of that is going to change, you know. You mentioned that, you know, things like tariff policy in your earlier in your answer about the work you're doing at NAM, so all of these things playing a huge role into manufacturing technology, into the manufacturing economy, workforce being a key part of that. So many incredible efforts that you're taking part in on the workforce side, and I want to give you an opportunity to highlight one in particular.

I will tell you, as we record this today, is a Thursday, Monday of this week. My father-in-law, so my wife's father did his honor flight to Washington, D.C. He's a Vietnam veteran, and certainly individuals that served in Vietnam when they came back the first time didn't necessarily get the welcome that they, that they certainly deserved.

In fact, they got exactly the opposite, an opportunity for people, literally 1000 people showed up when that plane landed back in Wausau, Wisconsin, to greet these 93 veterans back to back to the state of Wisconsin after spending the day in Washington, DC. We owe a huge debt of gratitude in this country to our veterans. It's one thing to say we owe a huge debt of gratitude to them, it's another thing to actually put our money and our efforts where our mouth is to actually stand up and say yes.

Welcome back. And, oh, by the way, we're going to create a great opportunity for you as you're coming back from wherever you served and whatever you were doing in the US military. Rockwell, to its great credit, is done exactly that. I've been involved with your Academy of Advanced Manufacturing now for probably three or four years, been working really closely with people like Paul Perkins of Amateur, that's a huge supporter of that work, Phil Bush, that's been leading that work, and I know you've got some more changes in terms of leadership going on there, and even more great people becoming involved in AAM.

What for our audience is AAM? Why is it so important to you, and tell us about the results? So every year 300,000 people who served a country returned its civilian life, and in many cases they don't know what they're going to do next. They're coming from a very regimented, ordered environment, and understanding, you know, what they can do next is a big question.

We took the curriculum that we've used for decades, for you know, training our field service engineers on, you know, how to design automation systems, being able to commission them, troubleshoot them, and so on, in a very efficient, you know, it's a 12 week program that we took that curriculum and made it available. Goal free of charge to returning service people, and you know, originally we teamed up with Manpower Group to help recruit those servicemen and women, and to make them aware of this program, that you know, if they were able to, you know, give us 12 weeks in Cleveland or Milwaukee, they would get hands-on training that would make them great candidates for good paying technician jobs in manufacturers all around the country.

Importantly, Rockwell wasn't going to, you know, have dibs on, you know, the very best students, you know, at the at the front of the line. We wanted to make sure that while we do hire some of the students, we make sure that they're available for manufacturers around the country to be able to come in to interview a couple of times during that program, and to select the people that they feel will be the best fit for their manufacturing, very high graduation rates, right, very high employment rates, to the extent that we've been able to do longitudinal studies on how they do, you know, 235, years out, very good, and we've, we've graduated well over 600 people, amazing, since 2017 you know, very rewarding.

My wife was in the army reserve, I know the struggle that you know of a, you know, a young person, you know, coming out, and to be able to provide that, and for Rockwell to be able to lend a hand has been extremely rewarding for everybody involved, and it's a source of pride for our employees. If we wanted the people who've gone through the program, it's been life changing, and we're in the process of expanding that, being able to extend the curriculum to tech schools, so that we can scale even faster.

It's a tremendous example of doing well by doing good, and certainly you're doing incredible, changing lives of these veterans, right, in incredible ways, which is really, really important. Also, deploying these folks, not just into your business, but probably even more important into US manufacturing, into your customers. In many cases, their growth is going to be constrained by a lack of talent, and so by creating this talent for them, you're helping customers and others in manufacturing grow.

That's just going to serve to help you continue to run a really prosperous business, reinvest in programs like this, so it's just a great, great example, and you deserve a ton of credit for that work that you've done. I've got time for two more questions. Since you were on so early the first time, we hadn't started asking these standard questions of our guests, and probably starting six months into the podcast, we made the first one a, or the second one, I should say, a standard question, added another question about two or three years ago, so all of our guests get these questions, and I'm really, really excited to hear and interested to hear your answers.

Blake, the first one is we all have our own education pathway. We talked a little bit about yours, certainly came up on the STEM side. Georgia Tech, a great institution, obviously prepared you well for an incredible, incredible career. Is there an opinion or a belief that you have about education that might surprise our audience a little bit, something that's a little different.

I don't think this would be all that surprising, but you know, the importance of getting the hands-on skills, as well as the theory, you know, I think is it's hard to do, you know, in a lot of four-year universities continue to struggle with that. At Georgia Tech, there was a co-op program that allowed people to, you know, work and to see a little bit about the real world, as well as, you know, learning the theoretical aspect of things. I wasn't a part of that, but I did have an opportunity to intern.

As it turns out, I was working for Rockwell's Missile Systems division. When I went to work for Alan Bradley, yeah, you know, there was no mention of Rockwell. It only occurred after I had accepted work and before I showed up in Milwaukee that Rockwell swooped in and bought. I remember when, at the time, the private Alan Bradley company, for sure.

I think, you know, maybe the observation after all these years, is you know the importance of lifelong learning, right? You're going to learn a certain amount of things early in your career, in high school, and you know, vocational school, you know, in university. In no way, you know, are those going to be the technologies that are at the frontier 20 years from now, they weren't, you know, from the time I graduated in the 80s, you know, to now, for sure, and they won't be 20 years from now.

The pace of change, if anything, has has sped up, and so being able to institutionalize the opportunities for people to be able to get that learning along the way, you know along their journey, I think, is super important, super important. We're seeing tremendous advancements in that space, whether it's third-party credentials, whether it's organizations like the Smart Automation Certification Alliance, that I know you're a huge advocate for, whether it's competency-based education, we're seeing in the in the technical community colleges and universities, and we're.

Force training programs, and I know Rockwell's been a huge investor in that for your own employees as well. We're seeing that across the board, and I would also just suggest that that's not just something you're saying. I mean, I'm listening to you talk as fluently as you do about technologies that didn't even exist five years ago. I can tell that you're an absolute student of change, you're an absolute student of what's happening, not just in manufacturing technology, but finance, economics, the whole, the whole nine yards of the American and the global economy.

So, credit to you for practicing what you preach, being a lifelong learner. So, you've been learning quite some time, as have I. I want to go back even earlier, way, way earlier than your time at Georgia Tech, to maybe that time when you're 15 years old, you're a sophomore in high school. Again, it's a question we love asking every example, every guest, I should say, on The TechEd Podcast, Blake.

And that is, if you could go back and give that young man, that 15-year-old Blake Moret, one piece of advice, what would you tell him? Oh, wow, you know, I think spending more time thinking about what it is that I wanted to do, you know, the combination of things that were interesting, and the type of work that I wanted to do at that time. Maybe a year later, I was interning in an architect's office, and you know, it was interesting, but I wasn't thinking about it as much as, you know, you know, is this something that you want to make your life's work, as you know, there's something to do after school, between, you know, football and tracks, and sub, and so I think just being a little bit more serious about it, even that early, to think about what are you going to give, you know, your best talent to over time in the in the workforce, it's great advice, and I can tell you, we had a guest on, Dr.

Casey Sachs, maybe two years ago, a year and a half ago, who had done a study of middle school students, and she noted that the average middle school student, so a little bit earlier than sophomore or high school, average middle school student could name 12 career paths, 12, you know, and it was what their parents did, their neighbors did, their friends' parents did, policemen, firemen, checkout person at the grocery store, the people that they saw, which I think really speaks to, first of all, some of the great exposure opportunities that you're providing to students and learners and young people, but also to the young people, and we have a number of them that listen to the podcast because of our role in STEM and technical education.

Educate yourself about what's available to you, think about what career opportunities are available to you, where you could fit in, what the education pathway is, what the workplace work-based learning pathway is to those careers. I think that's great advice. And having asked this question now hundreds of times, I'm not sure that we've had anybody answer it quite the way that you just did. So, let's make sure that we're opening up our eyes to these different opportunities.

You certainly opened up our eyes today, Blake, to the great things happening at Rockwell Automation, your work at Weft, your work at the NAM, incredible technology advancements, $2 billion being put to work here in the United States, and expanding and upgrading your manufacturing facilities. We're really at it at this incredible time in American manufacturing. You're at the apex in a leadership role of a great, great company, and I know you've got plenty of things to do with your time, so glad that you spent so much, so much of it with us today on The TechEd Podcast.

My pleasure. Thanks, Matt. Absolutely, anytime you're welcome back anytime. Let's not make it another five years.

I think it would be probably too much change that happens in that period of time that we, that we'll want to cover. So, we'll certainly stay in touch. Want to invite our audience to do a couple things. First of all, check out the show notes, we'll, we'll put some information about this smart manufacturing report that we reference some of the other items that Blake referenced on this particular episode of the podcast.

We will put those at TechEd podcast.com/moret too, because it's a separate second episode that would be TechEd podcast.com/m O R E T, and then the number two. When you're done there, check us out on social media.

You will find us on TikTok. We're going crazy on YouTube, we're on Instagram, we're on Facebook, we are on LinkedIn. Wherever you go to consume your social media, you will find The TechEd Podcast. When you find us, reach out, say hello.

We would love to hear from you. Can't wait to see everybody next week on the next episode of The TechEd Podcast. Until then, I'm your host, Matt Kirkner. Thanks for being with us.

Bye.