by Gary Mintchell | Feb 6, 2026 | Commentary
I’ve been a fan of Om Malik’s writing for decades. There was Red Herring magazine and his GigaOm website. He’s tapped into the tech scene, thoughtful, and insightful.
As you peruse the news, do you get a feeling that it’s just announcement after announcement, video scene after video scene?
You don’t have time to breathe, let alone think, between the decreasing intervals between news cycles.
Check out Om’s Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why.
Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the information ecosystem.
People once told me they labeled news sources as politically liberal or conservative. I told them they were missing the point. It was really something like sensational (to capture and hold your attention) or very sensational.
The early 1990s Internet, followed by blogging at the turn of the century, and social media a decade later all helped me do that main thing. In the mid-2000s I embraced Dave Winer’s mantra of “sources going direct.” As far back as 2009, I outlined the coming changes in my essays “How Internet Content Distribution and Discovery Are Changing” and “Amplification and the Changing Role of Media.”
I empathize and followed a similar path.
For the past decade and a half, the whole information ecosystem has become much larger, faster and noiser. It is hardly surprising that nothing works. And we feel a collective sense of overwhelming disappointment.
So, why does nothing work?
Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.
What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.
With so much coming at us all the time, it is difficult to give any single story or news event much weight. More content means already fragmented attention fractures even further.
What’s the new meme?
Velocity has taken over.
Remember the good old days of Facebook and Twitter before the rise of algorithms?
Algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter do not optimize for truth or depth. They optimize for motion. A piece that moves fast is considered “good.” A piece that hesitates disappears. There are almost no second chances online because the stream does not look back. People are not failing the platforms. People are behaving exactly as the platforms reward. We might think we are better, but we have the same rat-reward brain.
We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic. The networks of the past were slower and at a scale that was adaptable. I wrote about this years ago, and nothing since has disproved it. So when the author of “beliefs outrun facts” says nothing works, now you know why.
For example, YouTube.
Let’s use YouTube technology reviews as a case study, because they are universally understandable. Take the launch of a new phone: when the embargo lifts, dozens of polished video reviews appear on YouTube. They run about 20 minutes, share similar thumbnails, and use the same mood lighting. The reviewers had access to the phones before everyone else, so they had time to prepare their reviews.
In the old days, before the current phase of content abundance, folks like Walt Mossberg, Ed Baig, David Pogue, and Steven Levy were often the first to get Apple products for review. Sure, these folks had big platforms, but that head start gave them a lot of clout, which meant many non-Apple companies offered them early access to their products. I never felt cheated or misled by their reviews, though I did notice what they omitted after using the product for a few months.
These days, things are markedly different. For YouTubers, access is the currency of survival. Access, of course, means suggested talking points. Again, nothing new. What’s different is that every reviewer knows that if they paint outside the lines, they’ll lose access. If you don’t have the review out when the embargo lifts, it doesn’t matter if you have a better review; no one is going to notice.
The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it. The “review” at launch outperforms the review written two months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by nature. It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.
I’m not sure to what extent this has invaded the manufacturing technology space—but I have met a few who are trying. As for me, I’m a thinker and prefer waiting and evaluating. If you don’t like that, it is OK. I am what I am.
Om concludes:
The cost of all this isn’t abstract. It’s the review that took three months, and no one will read it. It’s the investigation that requires patience. It’s the work of understanding before passing judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. In a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.
I like signal rather than noise. Read his entire essay. It’s worth it.
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by Gary Mintchell | Feb 3, 2026 | Business, Commentary, News
Have you who live in the US noticed how the European and Asian automation and control companies have reduced their footprint in America? Not only that, have you noted how (except for Rockwell Automation) the US-based companies increasingly held their conferences overseas?
Long before Trump, a few politicians recognized American manufacturing’s demise.
Reflecting on my experiences in manufacturing and then writing about it, I long ago noted the “Walmart effect”. That company changed advertising decades ago from “Made in America” to “Lowest Prices Always.” Forcing their suppliers to reduce their price every year forced them to drive all costs both material and labor to the lowest possible. And not only Walmart.
Checking today’s News Items by John Ellis, I spotted this item he cites from the Wall Street Journal.
The manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age for America is going in reverse. After years of economic interventions by the Trump and Biden administrations, fewer Americans work in manufacturing than any point since the pandemic ended. Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to federal figures, extending a contraction that has seen more than 200,000 roles disappear since 2023. An index of factory activity tracked by the Institute for Supply Management shrunk in 26 straight months through December, but showed a January uptick in new orders and production that surprised analysts. The Census Bureau estimates that manufacturing construction spending, which surged with Biden-era funding for chips and renewable energy, fell in each of Trump’s first nine months in office. (Source: wsj.com)
Investment is good. However, it doesn’t come first. What comes first are entrepreneurs—either independent or in a corporation—who see a customer need to solve. They develop a product. Then they need investment to make it—especially investment and encouragement to make it here. And encouragement in a way that does not screw the locality through sucking up resources without paying for them.
I suggest that it’s not merely the Walmart effect. It’s really the lack of imagination and engineering coupled with too many finance majors.
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by Gary Mintchell | Jan 26, 2026 | Automation, Commentary, Generative AI
Vijay Narayan, Business Unit Head, Manufacturing, Logistics, Energy, Utilities at Cognizant, recently spoke with me about what they are seeing in their consulting work with manufacturing and logistics companies. We broached on AI, workforce, and strategy.
Cognizant promotes developing and using digital twins to pilot new machines enabling simulation for optimization. AI for predictive maintenance has been useful for efficiency. He finds progress in adopting automation across the industries he serves as staggered. Same with AI. Companies take one step up and find they can’t go back. The most useful sponsorship for adoption in his experience comes from the CFO. That office asks about how to gain efficiency. At the local level, the plant manager holds the keys to effective adoption.
Following our conversation, I found this press release about a report on analysis of how AI will impact work and jobs.
The new research reveals AI is changing the workforce faster than previously reported: it’s now capable of handling $4.5 trillion in U.S. work tasks and impacting potentially 93% of jobs today. However, the report also underscores that AI is not a blanket solution for advancing labor productivity: human involvement and adaptable operations continue to be vital to capturing the full value potential of AI.
Cognizant’s analysis for New Work, New World 2026 is based on a reassessment of 18,000 tasks and 1,000 jobs in the O*NET labor database, with a focus on how jobs and tasks could be assisted or automated by AI. Specifically, the new study points to an accelerated pace of change in “exposure scores”—the degree to which a job can be assisted or automated by AI—and highlights how those evolving changes can influence labor and enterprise success.
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by Gary Mintchell | Jan 14, 2026 | Commentary, Generative AI
Cal Newport’s year-end wrap-up of AI in 2025 echoes Dr. Seuss and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
Check out his podcast Ep 386: Was 2025 a Great or Terrible Year for AI? (w/ Ed Zitron). For added bonus points, read his newsletter Why Didn’t AI “Join the Workforce” in 2025?
Newport’s entre into the discussion:
Exactly one year ago, Sam Altman made a bold prediction: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.” Soon after, OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, elaborated on this claim when he stated in an interview that 2025 would be the year “that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing…to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you.” He provided examples, such as filling out paperwork and booking hotel rooms. An Axios article covering Weil’s remarks provided a blunt summary: “2025 is the year of AI agents.”
I’ve written to the founders of Axios about their use of click bait and misleading headlines. The content is often spot-on, but ignore the headlines. Aside from that, there was supposed to be a “hockey stick” growth curve in power and usefulness of Generative AI and Agentic AI. Heck, I even wrote a few columns on those relating to manufacturing.
The industry had reason to be optimistic that 2025 would prove pivotal. In previous years, AI agents like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex had become impressively adept at tackling multi-step computer programming problems. It seemed natural that this same skill might easily generalize to other types of tasks. Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, became so enthusiastic about these possibilities that early in 2025, he claimed that AI agents would imminently unleash a “digital labor revolution” worth trillions of dollars.
Once again reality beats hype.
But here’s the thing: none of that ended up happening.
As I report in my most recent New Yorker article, titled “Why A.I. Didn’t Transform Our Lives in 2025,” AI agents failed to live up to their hype. We didn’t end up with the equivalent of Claude Code or Codex for other types of work. And the products that were released, such as ChatGPT Agent, fell laughably short of being ready to take over major parts of our jobs. (In one example I cite in my article, ChatGPT Agent spends fourteen minutes futilely trying to select a value from a drop-down menu on a real estate website.)
Voice of a skeptic:
Silicon Valley skeptic Gary Marcus told me that the underlying technology powering these agents – the same large language models used by chatbots – would never be capable of delivering on these promises. “They’re building clumsy tools on top of clumsy tools,” he said. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy implicitly agreed when he said, during a recent appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast, that there had been “overpredictions going on in the industry,” before then adding: “In my mind, this is really a lot more accurately described as the Decade of the Agent.”
What I have been trying to parse out for all of last year in my AI interviews:
I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities.
For those trying to reach me with more AI hype—I am most interested in those pieces of actually useful AI that are helping people do their jobs while providing benefits to organizations. Let’s see more of that. I want to know what’s real.
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by Gary Mintchell | Dec 4, 2025 | Commentary
I started writing this blog in 2003. The first name was Gary’s Radio Weblog—I used Dave Winer’s Radio Userland. I moved the blog to SquareSpace a bit later and renamed it Gary’s FeedForward to parallel my work at Automation World magazine. When I left Automation World in 2013, the blog moved to WordPress and gained the name The Manufacturing Connection. The blog has grown to more than 300K visits per month, and some months actually 200K more.
Meanwhile, I started playing with podcasting in 2007. I would sometimes record the podcasts on Quicktime on the Mac and post on YouTube along with the audio only on Libsyn.
I promoted both of these plus another personal blog on Twitter for years.
Several years ago, Twitter (now X) became useless for this promotion. I would also promote on LinkedIn. Now, LinkedIn acts like Facebook—do you want to reach people? Click here to boost your post (for a fee, of course).
This year I noticed a sudden reduction in the number of podcasts downloads. Simultaneously, the number of visits to the YouTube site rapidly grew. Weird.
Seth Godin is a marketing guru, publisher, speaker, blogger, and more. I’ve followed him for more than 15 years. He recently documented his experiences. I don’t feel so alone.
The Hotel California (and subscriptions)
Every day, this blog is automatically echoed on my Linkedin channel. Over the last few years, the traffic to those posts on Linkedin is down more than 90%. Understandable. Platforms evolve, people shift their patterns and interests.
I recently did a manual post on Linkedin, though, and was amazed to discover that within minutes, it had 10 times as much traffic as a typical post does. I did another one about this leap and it did even better. It’s clear that the algorithm was changed.
Not to help me, not to help you, but to help the endless quest for more that most public companies wrestle with.
The seduction is clear. They’re sending a message: If you want us to bring you eyeballs, move in. Don’t link out.
Problem one: eyeballs don’t make change happen, people do.
Problem two: Don’t check into a motel that makes it hard to check out.
Enshittification is real. VCs and public markets push the companies they invest in to maximize profits. First, please the customers. Then, double cross them to please the advertisers. Finally, double cross both of them to please the stock price.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 14, 2025 | Business, Commentary, Manufacturing IT, News
I’ve had the opportunity to talk with many CEOs and SVPs following acquisitions that, to me, seemed out of place. Perhaps a distraction to core business. Perhaps just an ego play to build a larger business/division. Two ranking executives told me that the acquired company and the acquiring company’s software were build with object-oriented programming. Therefore, they said, they could just combine the objects into a new, stronger software offering.
Neither succeeded.
It so happened that the PTC CEO and I were attending the same conference not long after the acquisition of ThingWorx and Kepware. Both acquisitions were beneficial to the owners of the acquired companies. I couldn’t see how entering a new market could help PTC’s business.
“Gary,” I was assured, “we will integrate all the software into a unified and comprehensive industrial software offering.”
I didn’t believe it then. Subsequent events proved me correct. PTC has unloaded the two companies to TPG, a company that seems (foolishly?) trying to grow into a market that I think is dominated (at least in terms of innovation) by Inductive Automation. TPG previously acquired the industrial software business (former Cimplicity, Intellution, iFix) from GE Vernova. I bet they think they can integrate the three (and perhaps others?) into a competitive offering.
Meanwhile, PTC states that the “sale of Kepware and ThingWorx businesses enables PTC to increase focus on Intelligent Product Lifecycle vision.”
PTC further says, “Transaction will provide the Kepware and ThingWorx businesses with additional resources for growth.” I guess that means that PTC had ceased providing sufficient resources for that said growth. TPG is one of those private equity firms. Think it will fatten them up for eventual sale?
Here’s a bit about the businesses, in case you’ve forgotten about them.
Kepware facilitates connectivity between industrial automation devices and applications, acting as a communication platform that enables data exchange and integration across a diverse range of industries including manufacturing, oil and gas, and utilities to simplify the process of collecting, monitoring, and controlling data from multiple sources. ThingWorx is a comprehensive IoT platform for industrial enterprises that connects systems, analyzes data, and enables the remote management of devices through a secure and scalable architecture.
The transaction is expected to close in the first half of calendar year 2026, subject to the satisfaction of regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.
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