“The ultimate price for manufacturers right now is agility—it’s a capability that shifts you straight from survive to thrive,” the division’s president, Andreas Renulf, noted to start the report, adding that the import taxes are “the crest of a much larger wave. With the constant threat of supply chain shocks, mounting time to market pressures, and the ongoing skills crunch—the industry is navigating constant turbulence.”

See also: Taking a technological approach to blunt the punch from tariffs

Renulf and the Hexagon report’s overall message: “Don’t stand still.”

In it, 20% of the respondents were from North America, 33% from the EMEA region (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), 37% from the Asian-Pacific area of the world, and 10% hailed from Latin America.

The report focuses on five verticals: electronics manufacturing (represented by 22% of the respondents); automotive (another 22%); health care and life sciences (21% representation); energy (18%); and aerospace and defense (17%). All respondents hailed from companies with anywhere from 500 to 20,000 employees.

Agility dominates the Top 5

The top five business issues among manufacturers—the high cost of new product introduction (their No. 1 priority, according to the report), supply chain challenges, sourcing materials and parts, lack of agility, and long time to market of products—that the report’s 1,051 respondents identified are all related to agility, according to Hexagon.

“This tells us that business resilience and agile responsiveness is the main issue on the minds of the manufacturing industry,” the 2025 report notes.

See also: Manufacturers cite widespread labor shortages, use of automation and AI to help

Quality issues, an agility inhibitor, also are pervasive among the respondents, with one third of the manufacturers saying they are unable to identify the root cause of quality issues.

The 1,051 identified four key areas of their focus: 91% expect AI investment will deliver quality improvement; 78% said greater supply chain information and will help in tariff times; 75% are prioritizing earlier designs to improve quality; and 72% said they need more automation for their operations.

Barriers to digital transformation, benefits from AI and robotics

The global Hexagon study also asked manufacturers where they see hurdles to digitalization, and a third of the 1,051 said too many of their processes are still analog. Almost one-third said they suffer data quality issues while 33% said their companies’ employees lack digital skills for implementation of transformation. Overall, 91% said they faced some kind of barrier to digitalization.

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The report also sees manufacturers seizing on the benefits of automation, specifically AI, with 90% reporting that they are gaining competitive advantage from investment in artificial intelligence, with 49% already realizing the benefits of AI adoption and another 41% expecting to do so.

Almost three-quarters of the respondents (72%) think more automation investment should be a priority for improving quality with 65% believing physical automation with robots offers large investment benefit.

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