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Dec 9, 2025
Australia must rethink the foundations of industrial automation
processonline.com.au
By Carlos Urbano, Vice President - Industry, Schneider Electric
Thursday, 04 December, 2025
Australia's manufacturing sector is at a pivotal moment. Competitive pressure, sustainability expectations, energy costs and a new wave of digital tools are converging, exposing the limits of the automation approaches that have defined industrial production for decades.
Across industry, conversations are shifting. Manufacturers no longer ask whether they should adopt digital technologies. They are asking how to build an automation environment that can keep pace with them. The challenge is not ambition; it is architecture. This is where the sector's next competitive advantage will be won or lost.
For years, industrial automation was built on systems designed for stability, isolation and long lifecycles. These systems served their purpose well, but they belong to an era where operational change was slow and integration requirements were simple. The technologies now reshaping manufacturing -- from AI-driven optimisation to real-time analytics and low-latency decision engines -- demand a fundamentally different level of flexibility.
The shift is already underway. Manufacturers want automation platforms that are open, interoperable and vendor-agnostic. They want to adopt AI tools without rebuilding entire control systems. They want access to the thousands of new industrial applications emerging globally, not to a fraction of them limited by proprietary interfaces. And they want the confidence that decisions made today will not restrict their options tomorrow.
This desire for openness is not philosophical; it is operational. When a modern facility needs to trial a new optimisation algorithm, integrate additional sensors or adopt an emerging AI model, the question should not be whether the system will allow it, but how quickly it can be done. That expectation, more than anything else, is driving the momentum towards flexible, software-led automation.
AI is accelerating this s
