Automation means using technology to complete tasks and processes with minimal human intervention. The term encompasses a variety of technologies, from robotic palletizing cells to AI product management tools. Automation is transforming industries, and automating parts of your business has tremendous benefits.
The argument for automation gets stronger every year. Just 10 years ago, we were introducing companies to the basic benefits of automating even one process, but now people often come to us knowing that they already want to automate. And they want to do it quickly and efficiently.
Especially for robotics, adding automation has many benefits. While many discussions focus on the “simple benefits” of automation, such as increased efficiency, productivity, and performance, automation has much more subtle benefits.
If you want your business to thrive this year, it’s important to understand the specific benefits that are most important to you right now. It’s also important to know what to avoid when automating to avoid common pitfalls.
Let’s take a look at nine of the key benefits of automation in 2025.
9 Benefits of Automation in 2025 (and What to Avoid)
1. Flexibility and agility
In robotic automation, we often talk about flexibility and agility. These are two benefits of automation, but one will become increasingly relevant in 2025.
Flexible automation refers to a system that can meet planned changes to task or product requirements. For example, your company may experience seasonal surges in production. Flexible automated processes can adapt to these predictable changes.
Nicolas Lauzier, Robotiq R&D Project Manager, emphasizes that this agility and associated smart technologies can give your company a competitive advantage.
“In the current economic climate, there is an urgent need to adopt automated solutions. According to the report, smart factory solutions will be a key driver of competitiveness over the next five years.”
The pitfall to avoid here is investing too much in rigid automation solutions. These products are often designed for mass production and may be in short supply in today’s rapidly developing markets.
2. Easily scale and adapt to change
The biggest benefit of automation is scalability. Not only can the right automation help you increase production to meet strategic growth goals, but agile automation can also help you transform production to respond to unexpected market changes.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we saw that many companies that were successful in adapting to changing global conditions had invested in the right automation before the pandemic.
One strategy that can be very beneficial is to deploy “copy-paste” robotic cells. This involves deploying a specific application once and then replicating the same cells to scale to production.
An example of copy-paste automation is distributed palletizing. This modular approach involves adding a palletizing cell to the end of each new production line. By integrating this key end-of-line process into the line itself, there is no need to significantly reconfigure the facility each time production scales up.
The pitfall to avoid here is assuming you know what the market wants in the future or relying too much on predictions. Instead, invest in automation that allows you to quickly adapt to changes as they occur.
3. Expand local production scale
Local production enhanced through collaborative robotic automation is increasingly viewed as a strategic choice for manufacturers.
For many years, overseas production was seen as a way to scale up production. However, recently, reshoring production has become popular. This change is not just a trend; it is becoming a necessity in a rapidly changing economic and geopolitical environment.
By bringing production closer to home, manufacturers can experience many benefits, including reduced transportation costs, shorter lead times, and the ability to customize products for local markets.
Reshoring through robotic automation builds resilience into company operations by reducing dependence on complex global supply changes.
A pitfall to avoid in reshoring is comparing only the initial costs without calculating the long-term return on investment in automation. Because overseas operations often rely on low-cost labor, the costs of automated solutions may seem higher at first. However, when you plan for the medium to long term, cost savings often become clear.
4. Use data to make better decisions
Automation not only performs core business tasks, it also generates valuable data. This data can be fed into broader business analytics to help you make better strategic choices.
In the modern world, data is essential to making good business decisions. For example, robotic systems allow us to generate data that can help us continually optimize robot deployments and improve performance.
The eBook Analytics for Cobots highlights how collaborative robots can simplify the capture of this essential data. Tracking only the right metrics allows you to focus on those that directly align with your operational requirements for automated solutions.
Collecting this data can also help you justify past decisions, such as investing in automation in the first place. For example, data collected from collaborative robots can help calculate ROI and make decisions about future automation projects.
The pitfall to avoid here is tracking unnecessary data. Monitor and analyze only data relevant to your needs and applications.
5. Resolving manpower shortage
Labor shortages are a growing challenge in modern manufacturing and are an issue we have been tracking for many years. As the workforce ages and fewer people are skilled in key tasks (such as final palletizing), automation is increasingly becoming the only option for some companies.
Robotiq’s Nicholas Lauzier emphasized the urgency of this situation in 2024, saying:
“Studies show that the labor shortage currently facing manufacturers is not likely to decrease and in fact is expected to get worse. As people retire, younger workers are increasingly choosing jobs that offer better working conditions and compensation, and are increasingly choosing jobs in manufacturing. “I’m avoiding it.”
Automation provides a strategic response to this problem, allowing you to maximize the potential of your existing teams. By allowing automated systems to take over more repetitive and routine tasks, we free up skilled professionals to focus on more valuable and intellectually stimulating activities.
A pitfall to avoid is not informing your team of staffing shortages before adding automation. Understanding why people are adding this new technology will make it easier for them to get involved.
6. Building a safer, better workplace
One of the most underrated benefits of automation is its ability to create a better workspace. Addressing the “4Ds of robotics” eliminates the most unappealing aspects of people’s jobs.
These 4 Ds represent boring, dangerous, dirty and valuable work. This is a profession that typically suffers from low morale, high accident rates, low quality of work, and increased operating costs. By automating this, we can reduce the burden on human workers and make their work more rewarding.
Robots are often excellent at performing tasks that humans do not enjoy doing. For example, a boring task might be a repetitive assembly task. When human workers perform the same task for hours on end, they can become demotivated and the quality of their work can suffer. But robots easily and consistently perform the same tasks for hours.
The pitfall to avoid here is not involving team members in the deployment. Involving people from the beginning often leads to better results because it gives them ownership of the robot deployment.
7. Reduce waste and increase sustainability
Sustainability has become a key focus in many industries. As many companies seek to align their operations with more sustainable practices, automation can provide a powerful tool to guide this change.
For example, robotic automation has been shown to make packaging processes more sustainable. Packaging can be a very wasteful production step in terms of material and energy use. Using the right automation solution can help you solve this problem and contribute to improving your company’s overall sustainability.
Adding collaborative robotic packaging can help you optimize your workflow and reduce material usage to a minimum. For example, monitoring robots can help adjust the amount of material used in packaging to reduce it to a minimum. This is not a one-off activity, but rather a step that should be revisited frequently to see how waste can be further reduced.
A pitfall to avoid at this stage is looking at automated processes in isolation. Sometimes, you can significantly reduce waste during robot deployment by discovering other inefficiencies in the remaining operations.
8. Ensure consistent operation
Robotic automation is often best known for its increased efficiency and productivity, but perhaps its most transformative benefit is consistency.
Unlike manual processes, automation is highly consistent. This is very important in business processes as it ensures the company’s reliability and maintains a high level of product quality. Adding robots to your production workflow not only improves the consistency of specific tasks, but also improves the consistency of the overall production flow.
In Eli Goldratt’s book “The Goal,” the author highlights how certain robotic workstations can help eliminate problematic bottlenecks by setting the pace for the rest of the production process. People in manufacturing often talk about how robots are making them more consistent, because they want to “beat the robots” or keep up with the robots’ consistent throughput.
Lean Robotics provides a focused path to help you achieve this consistency in your business. The first step of mapping your existing manual processes can help you identify wasteful or inconsistent steps before automating them with robots.
The pitfall to avoid here is trying to fit automation into the process without considering the rest of the production steps.
9. Automation is easier than ever.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of using automation in 2025 will be how easy it is to do so compared to the past.
When we first started helping companies automate their processes, they still had a lot of work to do during deployment. These days, adding robots to production is easier than ever.
Samuel Bouchard, CEO of Robotiq, said at the Automata trade show:
“With plug-and-play components, there’s still some integration required. Our early adopters were happy to do that. Now we’re working with people who don’t even know what a cobot is. This allows for more people. “We are planning to introduce this robot into our factory.”
Solutions like application kits allow you to quickly and easily add robotics to your processes, helping you achieve your desired results.
By taking boring, dangerous, dirty, and valuable tasks out of human hands, you can use automation to make the mark you want to make on the world.
As Samuel said, these are some of the key drivers for Robotiq.
“For the past 14 years, our mission has been to free human hands from repetitive tasks. This is still our mission. We’re seeing a lot of collaborative robots, but we think we’re still in the early stages. There’s still a lot to do. There is potential left.”
How will we automate in 2025?
Automation in 2025 promises a world beyond efficiency and productivity.
The benefits ripple through every aspect of your business, from improved labor dynamics to sustainability, consistency and usability. But the key to reaping these rewards lies in applying automation carefully and avoiding key pitfalls.
What does the future of automation look like for your company?
Check out our application kits to see how easy it is to adopt automation this year.
Which benefits best fit your needs now? say Please leave a comment below or join the discussion on LinkedIn or Facebook.
