As we enter 2026, one thing is certain, AI and automation are here to stay. However, Martin Hurworth (pictured), CEO of
Bytronic Vision Intelligence, believes they should be seen as tools to liberate workers rather than replace them. He argues that this represents an important shift in narrative, one that focuses on enabling people to explore creativity and do what they do best, while robotics and AI take on the more routine and mundane repetitive tasks.
In an old video clip from a 1990s documentary, a woman working on a ceramics line sums up her role in one sentence: ‘My job is really boring’. Sat in front of a stamping machine, she picks up a bowl, pushes it into the machine, flips it over and places it in a growing stack beside her. She is fast, having practised this same move every second of every day, but it is horrible work. She said: “Some days the boredom gets so bad that I have to walk away from the machine, because I tend to get very angry when I really go over the top with boredom.”
Mr Hurworth explained: “Everyone talks about automation as if it is a looming force that will hollow out the workforce but, really, jobs like these are beneath us — beneath all of us — because they are, literally, robotic. Do not get me wrong — I have a lot of respect for people working these jobs, but I wish they could do something more fulfilling that actually uses their potential as human beings, rather than treating them like robots.
“Sadly, these jobs are not a thing of the past. Very recently I saw people doing the exact same thing, fast forward to today and it is with a scanner and a touchscreen — operators picking, scanning, pressing a screen and boxing 270 times per hour, trapped in repetitive jobs that could be done carried out by robots.“
Repetitive tasksHe continued: “We have swapped levers for touchscreens and clipboards for scanners, but the work itself has not evolved. We have just wrapped the same repetitive tasks in nicer interfaces and called it transformation. We need to stop forcing people to behave like machines.
“This matters because human beings are not well suited to prolonged repetition and constant vigilance. Asking someone to make the same judgement hundreds of times an hour, whether that is checking a seal, confirming a label or approving a scan, is not skilled labour. It is endurance. Over time, fatigue sets in, attention drifts and mistakes become inevitable. When failures occur, they are often framed as human error, when in reality they are system design failures.”
Much of this stems from how automation decisions are made. Investment is still routinely judged against short payback periods, we have even seen requirements of six to 12 months, with little consideration for what happens after that. Incremental changes are favoured because they feel safer and are easier to justify. They allow organisations to say they have modernised without confronting deeper questions about how work is structured and who should be doing what.
The cost of this conservatism is rarely captured in a business case. Disengaged operators, high staff turnover, inconsistent quality and fragile processes do not always appear as line items, but they erode performance over time. In sectors such as food manufacturing, where compliance, traceability and brand trust are fundamental, the consequences can be severe. Relying on people as the final safeguard in repetitive inspection tasks is neither fair nor robust.
Modern vision systems are criticalMr Hurworth added: “Proper automation changes this dynamic. When designed well, it removes the need for humans to perform robotic work and allows them to focus on tasks that genuinely require human judgement. This is where modern vision systems, combining optical imaging, thermal data and AI, play a critical role. They give machines the ability to see and decide consistently, without boredom or fatigue, and they do so at speeds no human can sustain.
“However, this is not an ‘out of the box’ solution. Vision systems demand careful engineering, testing and iteration, and they work best when developed in close partnership with the people who understand the process intimately. When that effort is invested, inspection becomes reliable, risk is exposed earlier and performance stabilises. When it is not, technology quietly gets bypassed, and people are pulled back into the soul-crushing jobs the machines were meant to take on.
He concluded: “The objective, then, is not to remove people from factories, but to raise the quality of the work they do within them. The most effective operations are those where automation absorbs repetition and leaves humans to improve processes, interpret data and respond to change. These environments are not only more productive, they are more humane. We already have the tools to build factories like this. What is often missing is the willingness to move beyond cosmetic change and rethink work at a more fundamental level. So stop treating people as if they are robots and realise the potential for people, productivity and profit by using actual robots instead.”