Roland Berger forecasts 6–9% annual growth as industrial automation capital spending accelerates through 2030

Industrial automation is entering what analysts describe as its strongest multi-year growth cycle in recent memory. Roland Berger projects that 2026 marks the start of five consecutive years of expansion, with annual growth running between 6% and 9% through 2030, according to Engineering.com. That forecast is landing just as the industry's biggest trade event, Automate 2026, brought a sharp reality check on where the technology actually stands versus where investors and media coverage would suggest it is headed.

What is driving the capital surge

The renewed momentum is not coming from a single catalyst. Engineering.com reports that Roland Berger points to factory modernization programs, North American reshoring activity, semiconductor fab construction, and manufacturer demand for more flexible production systems as the primary forces behind the uptick. Each of those trends requires automation infrastructure, and collectively they are pulling capital off the sidelines after several slower years.

One of the more structurally significant shifts, according to Engineering.com, is the move away from proprietary automation architectures. Manufacturers are replacing closed, vendor-locked control systems with standardized, software-driven platforms. The practical benefit is lower deployment cost per line and better scalability across facilities, a meaningful consideration for operations teams managing multiple plants or planning greenfield builds.

That platform shift also changes the procurement conversation. Buyers who previously evaluated automation vendors on hardware specs are increasingly assessing openness, software update cadence, and interoperability with existing MES and ERP layers. The Roland Berger outlook, as characterized by Engineering.com, suggests manufacturers that delay those platform decisions risk falling further behind as the cycle accelerates.

Automate 2026: humanoid hype meets operator skepticism

At the Automate 2026 trade show in Chicago, which ran June 22, 25, the gap between investor narrative and factory-floor reality was visible on the show floor itself. Dozens of booths demonstrated industrial arms, welding cells, and mobile robots performing repeatable production tasks. But some of the highest foot traffic went to humanoid robots that danced, interacted with attendees, and prepared beverages, according to Manufacturing Dive reporter Nathan Owens, who covered the event.

The enthusiasm drew pointed commentary from panelists at an executive session on the future of automation. Jim Brown, chief commercial officer for Teradyne Robotics, told the panel that while the humanoid form factor generates genuine excitement, attendees risk losing sight of what operational problem they are actually trying to solve, Manufacturing Dive reported. His framing cuts to a core evaluation question for any operations leader being pitched on bipedal automation: what unmet task does this solve better than a fixed arm or a mobile autonomous robot that already works at scale?

The honest answer, for most production environments today, is not much. Scalability constraints, unit economics, and reliability on varied surfaces and tasks remain unsolved at the volumes manufacturers need. That does not make humanoids irrelevant to a five-year planning horizon, but it does mean procurement teams should be skeptical of proposals that treat them as near-term production assets rather than R&D bets.

Where the near-term opportunity actually sits

The robots generating real operational traction at Automate 2026 were the ones already earning floor time: collaborative arms handling pick-and-place and assembly tasks, mobile robots moving materials between stations, and welding and painting cells with integrated vision systems. These categories benefit directly from the capital-spending cycle Roland Berger describes, because they are deployable now against documented labor constraints and cycle-time targets.

The accessibility question is also shifting. Manufacturing Dive noted that Automate executives highlighted growing availability of automation for manufacturers of all sizes, not just large-scale OEMs. That broadens the addressable buyer pool considerably and means mid-market operations directors who previously priced themselves out of automation projects should be revisiting vendor conversations.

What operations and procurement teams should watch

The Roland Berger 6, 9% growth projection is a market-level signal, but the operational implication is more specific. If the five-year cycle holds, component lead times, systems integrator capacity, and skilled deployment resources will tighten as the decade progresses. Teams planning automation projects in 2027 or 2028 may face a more constrained vendor market than those who move in 2026.

On the platform side, the shift from proprietary to software-driven architectures is already happening. Operations leaders who have not audited their current control infrastructure for openness and upgrade paths are starting behind. The vendors best positioned in this cycle, based on the trends Engineering.com and Manufacturing Dive both surfaced, are those offering modular, updatable platforms that can absorb new capabilities, including AI-driven vision and adaptive path planning, without a full hardware refresh.

Humanoids will eventually matter at the factory floor, but the executives at Automate 2026 were clear that the timeline is not quarters, it is years. For capital planning purposes, the near-term allocation goes to proven categories: collaborative robots, mobile autonomous platforms, and the software infrastructure that connects them to existing production systems. The next Automate, in 2027, will be the moment to reassess whether commercial humanoid deployments have cleared the scalability bar.