Trust in AI sits at its lowest in developed economies including the UK, Germany and the United States, according to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer. For FANUC UK, that distrust is the central obstacle — not technology readiness, cost, or complexity.
The industrial automation company, which supplies CNC systems, robots and cobots to manufacturers worldwide, has published a review of the five most persistent misconceptions holding back AI adoption in factory settings. The piece draws on labour economics research, pending EU legislation and FANUC's own deployments to push back on each one.
The jobs anxiety runs deepest. FANUC cites a 2022 Institute of Labor Economics study covering 16 European countries, which found robot adoption increased employment and reduced unemployment in most markets surveyed. The argument is not that automation poses no disruption — it is that the net employment effect, when studied over time, contradicts the intuitive fear.
On data security, the company makes a distinction that matters in practice: free consumer AI models may expose inputs as training data, but on-premise GPU infrastructure and established cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure do not carry the same risk. FANUC specifically singles out third-party data-sharing arrangements — diagnostics sent to machine suppliers, for example — as the realistic security boundary, rather than AI itself.
The obsolescence concern draws a more forward-looking response. FANUC says it is collaborating with NVIDIA to bring physical AI into mainstream manufacturing, with support for ROS 2 — the open-source robotics platform — enabling Python-based programming of FANUC industrial hardware. The move lowers the barrier for developers and researchers building AI-driven applications on established industrial kit.
The regulatory angle is concrete. The EU Cyber Resilience Act, which takes effect in 2027, will impose mandatory cybersecurity requirements on all hardware and software — AI products included. FANUC's R50iA controller, built on the FS500 CNC platform, is already compliant. The company says all its robots will carry the new controller as standard within two years.
On cost, FANUC echoes a McKinsey finding that organisations with the most ambitious AI agendas see the greatest returns — not because they spend more, but because they target growth and innovation rather than cost reduction alone. The prerequisite is a data foundation: structured, contextualised, available in real time. Not full digitisation, but enough instrumentation on critical equipment to feed predictive maintenance and quality applications.
FANUC operates across more than 270 locations globally, serving manufacturers in over 100 countries.
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