Wednesday, June 03, 2026
Metal fabrication's moment in the AI economy
www.thefabricator.com: After spending weeks talking with participants in this year’s FAB 40—a list of some of the largest contract metal fabricators in the country—I came to an odd realization: Contract fabrication really isn’t a unified business sector full of direct competitors, all fighting it out for market share.
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I think this article hits the nail on the head with what AI is useful for in existing sectors. AI as it stands is not well suited for taking a task from start to finish alone but applied correctly and with a good sense of the state of the industry it can be a useful tool. For safety reasons I agree with the article that it will be a long time before AI can automate fabrication. Not only is there technical nuance there's market nuance. For AI to take over fabrication it would need to understand the why as well as the how. Why certain contracts are more cost effective for some fabricators than others. Why different parts of the supply chain should or should not be brought in house. AI is good at generalizing, if you give it a problem it can tell you the solution that agrees with the majority of its training set. But when it comes to nuance I believe that humans still have AI beat.
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