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The promise of bringing manufacturing jobs back to America faces an inconvenient truth: factories of the future may not need many human workers. As Trump pursues policies aimed at revitalizing American manufacturing, a parallel revolution in AI and robotics is fundamentally reshaping what industrial work looks like—and who performs it.

The Amazon model provides perhaps the clearest window into this transformation. The company employs about 1.56 million people, most in warehouse roles, but it has also deployed over 1 million robots as of July 2025. This represents a dramatic acceleration from 200,000 robots in 2019 to 520,000 in 2022, and the trend shows no signs of slowing.

The human cost of this automation is already visible. Amazon has seen a reduction of over 100,000 employees from its 2021 peak of 1.6 million, even as its robotic workforce expanded exponentially. Around 75% of Amazon's deliveries now involve some form of robotic help—from robotic arms moving packages to wheeled units shuttling inventory. While Amazon's model isn't traditional manufacturing, it offers a preview of how AI and robotics reshape industrial work. The company has positioned itself as having both the world's largest robot workforce and being among the world's largest private employers—a combination that reveals both the potential and the tension in automation's advance.

Trump's emphasis on bringing manufacturing jobs back to America, which is great, is confronted with a fundamental challenge: as production returns to U.S. soil, jobs may not follow. Over the past 20 years, 2 million manufacturing jobs disappeared as automation allowed fewer workers to produce more goods. Then, amid China's economic rise and entry into the global trading system, manufacturing employment plunged by almost 6 million jobs between 1998 and 2010.

The current manufacturing landscape reflects this reality. As of February 2025, there were 482,000 manufacturing job openings, suggesting demand for workers, but the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte estimated that there would be 1.9 million unfilled jobs in manufacturing by 2033. This gap shows that the manufacturing jobs of the future require different competencies than in the past.  Manufacturing employment has been limited by the rise of robots and automation and the availability of vastly cheaper labor overseas. Even when companies reshore, because of the higher cost of labor, it's 50% more expensive to manufacture in the United States, driving continued investment in automation technologies.

For small towns across America that once thrived on manufacturing employment, this technological shift presents an existential challenge. They built their economies around factories employing thousands of workers with steady, middle-class wages. The new automated facilities may return production to American soil, but they're likely to employ dozens rather than hundreds. The industries that are most likely to need human workers tend to be the dirtiest, the least appealing, and the cheapest.  This suggests that some manufacturing jobs will remain, but they may not offer the same economic pathway to prosperity that previous generations of factory work provided.  The geographic concentration of these impacts matters enormously. Small towns lack the economic diversification to absorb displaced workers, and residents may lack the resources to relocate or retrain for emerging industries.

Amazon's approach offers one model for transition. Over 700,000 employees have been trained through training programs that prepare its workforce for the future. The company invests in retraining workers to operate alongside robots rather than simply replacing them.  However, this model has limits. The fundamental mathematics of automation mean that even the most worker-friendly implementations will require fewer human employees than traditional operations. The question isn't whether this transition will occur, but how quickly and whether displaced workers will have viable alternatives.

Trump's manufacturing revival agenda faces a paradox: the very technologies that make American manufacturing competitive—AI, robotics, and automation—reduce the need for human workers. As tariffs and trade policies succeed in bringing production back to America, they cannot bring back the labor-intensive manufacturing of previous decades.  As we reshore manufacturing to the United States, it would hardly produce an employment renaissance. Factories that return will be highly automated operations designed to compete with global manufacturing costs with technology over labor.

Small towns need economic diversification strategies that don't rely solely on attracting traditional manufacturing. This might include investments in digital infrastructure, education, and service industries that can't be easily automated. The transformation of manufacturing is inevitable, driven by technological capabilities that continue to advance regardless of political preferences. The question is whether communities can adapt quickly enough to thrive in this new landscape, or whether the benefits of increased productivity will bypass the people and places that built America's industrial heritage.

Success in this transition will require acknowledging that the manufacturing jobs of the future will be fundamentally different from the past—fewer in number, higher in skill requirements, and concentrated in highly automated facilities. The sooner communities begin preparing for this reality, the better positioned they'll be to navigate the changes ahead.

John A. Newby is the author of the "Building Main Street, Not Wall Street" column dedicated to helping local communities, government and business combine synergies allowing them to thrive in a world where truly-local is being lost to Amazon and Wall Street chains. His email is john@truly-local.org