Göppingen – November 04, 2026 -- Manufacturing IT decision-makers are twice as likely as their technology-sector peers to cite uncertainty about AI's value as a barrier to adoption (32% vs. 16%), even though 68% of them already use proactive or partially autonomous approaches to resolving technology issues, according to research from TeamViewer.
Manufacturers lead on proactive IT, with 43% resolving issues before users report them
Another 25% of manufacturing respondents report partially autonomous handling, in which AI predicts and prevents issues with some human oversight. Both figures exceed those for the technology sector (35% proactive, 21% partially autonomous) and the cross-industry averages (41% and 17%).
Preferences match practice. 28% of manufacturing respondents want IT to use AI to detect issues early and keep them informed, against 25% across industries. Only 19% would rather report issues themselves and wait for a fix, well below the 25% average.
Doubts about business impact rank among manufacturing's top three AI barriers at 32%
The 32% figure compares with 16% in technology and 21% across all industries. Security, privacy and risk concerns lead at 47%, and a lack of skills or training follows at 34%.
Mei Dent, Chief Product and Technology Officer at TeamViewer, said many manufacturers run on systems built over decades that they cannot simply replace. In her view, the biggest advances come from "thousands of smaller decisions" that happen quietly in the background, which makes their impact easy to overlook.
Productivity gains reach 44% of manufacturing respondents, versus 39% across industries
Manufacturing respondents who verify AI outputs spend an average of 1.6 hours a week doing so. The figure is 1.9 hours across industries and 2.7 hours in technology. Looking ahead, 35% of manufacturing respondents expect to delegate more tasks to AI by 2030 and focus on higher-value work, compared with 28% across industries.
TeamViewer's reading is that the value may be real but harder to measure at the organization level.
Only 23% of manufacturing respondents want human sign-off before any AI action
That compares with 31% across industries. However, 46% in manufacturing want a human involved when security, data or business operations could be affected, against 40% across industries. Manufacturing respondents prompt AI an average of 3.08 times a day, versus 3.28 across industries and 4.72 in technology.
Comfort with AI is consistently higher for visible, assistive tasks such as monitoring systems, flagging issues and transcribing than for AI making decisions alone or handling sensitive data unsupervised. The gap is widest among onsite and hybrid employees, who are less comfortable with autonomous AI than remote employees.
Sapio Research surveyed 4,200 respondents across nine markets in April and May 2026
The study covered the U.S., the U.K., Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore and Brazil. Sapio Research conducted it on behalf of TeamViewer.