Automation and Quality Assurance in 2025: Five Trends to Watch

Justen Hyde
26th of February 2025

Automation continues to reshape manufacturing, with quality assurance (QA) playing a critical role in improving efficiency, reducing waste, and ensuring compliance. As we head into 2025, here are five trends we believe will shape the future of automation and QA systems.

  1. Focus on Sustainability in QA
    As businesses prioritise sustainability, QA systems are playing a vital role in reducing waste. Automated inspections help minimise rework and defective materials, while ensuring products meet eco-friendly standards. In 2025, we expect sustainability to remain a key driver for investments in QA technology.

  2. Deflation of AI Hype
    Hype around AI has been extreme recently, and it often feels like it’s being pushed as a solution in areas where it’s simply not appropriate. Although trained convolutional neural networks in fields such as image classification and data mining can be very powerful, misapplied AI is a brittle and power-hungry technology prone to making weird, inexplicable but superficially plausible mistakes. As the AI bubble begins to burst, we predict that the use of AI as the default solution to every problem will begin to wane in favour of precise and intentional use only where it’s appropriate, with the rush to avoid being left behind maturing to thoughtful expertise-led selection of the best tools for the job - especially in applications such as QA where reliability and consistency are critical.

  3. Edge Computing will unlock automation of complex production systems
    Developments pushing GPU capabilities onto embedded systems suitable for industrial deployment mean increasing processing capability can be pushed ever closer to the running line, allowing rapid and powerful analyses to be conducted at the image capture device. Reduction of round-trips to central servers and distribution of processing will increasingly allow multiple intensive inspection tasks to be carried out in parallel and allow real-time feedback to be generated in areas which until recently may have seemed prohibitively difficult to automate.

  4. Customised Automation Solutions
    No two production lines are alike, and manufacturers are moving away from generic, one-size-fits-all solutions. Bespoke QA systems, like those designed by Emergent Design, allow businesses to address unique production challenges, providing tailored automation that maximises efficiency.

  5. Collaborative Partnerships for Innovation
    Solving complex QA challenges often requires collaboration between manufacturers and technology providers. In 2025, and fuelled in part by deflation of AI hype, we expect to see more partnerships focused on co-developing solutions that address specific needs, from defect detection to sustainability goals, working with manufacturers to develop deep understanding of their fundamental requirements as a basis for innovative improvements in automation.

Automation is no longer a future ambition, it’s a present-day necessity. For manufacturers to remain competitive, leveraging these trends will be key to unlocking efficiency, quality, and sustainability.