2025 Scorecard & 2026 Outlook | Augury %

2025 Scorecard & 2026 Outlook

Dec 29, 2025

Manufacturing Meet Up

Ed and Alvaro are back with their year-end crystal ball episode…and boy, they nailed some predictions while completely whiffing on others!

In this episode, they score their 2025 predictions (spoiler: sustainability was a BIG RED failure ❌), breaking down the 20 episodes that shaped Season 2, and going out on a limb with their 2026 forecasts.

Here’s what they cover:

Mentioned in this episode:

AI and ROI: Translating Time Saved to Business Gains
Chain Reaction 2025: Chief Supply Chain Officer Insights

Meet Our Hosts

Alvaro Cuba

Alvaro Cuba has more than 35 years of experience in a variety of leadership roles in operations and supply chain as well as tenure in commercial and general management for the consumer products goods, textile, automotive, electronics and internet industries. His professional career has taken him to more than 70 countries, enabling him to bring a global business view to any conversation. Today, Alvaro is a strategic business consultant and advisor in operations and supply chain, helping advance start-ups in the AI and advanced manufacturing space.

Ed Ballina

Ed Ballina was formerly the VP of Manufacturing and Warehousing at PepsiCo, with 36 years of experience in manufacturing and reliability across three CPG Fortune 50 companies in the beverage and paper industries. He previously led a team focused on improving equipment RE/TE performance and reducing maintenance costs while improving field capability. Recently, Ed started his own supply chain consulting practice focusing on Supply Chain operational consulting and equipment rebuild services for the beverage industry.

Full Transcript

Ed Ballina Hi, I’m Ed Ballina.
Alvaro Cuba Hello guys, Alvaro Cuba.
Ed Ballina We join you again for another episode of Manufacturing Meetup.
Wow, crazy. Almost two years. Well, two years in. That’s pretty amazing, Alvaro.
As you know, if you’ve listened to us before, this is a show where we kick back on our downtime and get real about efficiency on the plant floor.
It’s our opportunity to just relive some experiences, bring in some new guests, and have a lot of fun. So as we’ve always begun, we have hats.

Alvaro Cuba And we are now getting to the end of the year. So hope we had great Christmas. And now we are getting ready for new year. So in this case, I’m going to spend the new year skiing. So I’m getting ready with my gear, ski gear. How about you?

Ed Ballina Where are you going?

Alvaro Cuba I’m going to Colorado this time.

Ed Ballina Very nice, very nice. I loved Colorado. Keystone and Breckenridge were my two favorites up there. A lot of fun.
So my hat is actually not mine. This is a motorcycle school hat and it belongs to my older son Eddie who’s an absolute motorcycle nut.
He literally has 30 different motorcycles.

Alvaro Cuba Yeah, it’s going to be great.

Ed Ballina This is going to be a really fun episode because we get a chance to rate ourselves and make some outlandish predictions for next year.
If you remember, I was just looking back at our last year’s episode predictions. We actually had I think over 130 views.
So hopefully we’ll get your interest this time again.
So today, we’re talking about predictions.
we’re going to rate ourselves in the predictions we made last year, and we’re going to make some predictions on what we think is going to happen in 2026.

Alvaro Cuba 2026 amigo. Run, run, amigo, before the year comes.

Ed Ballina So we’re going to kick off our first segment by doing a scorecard of our predictions from last year, right?
Today, we’re going to score ourselves to see how we did.

And we’re going to use a very simple red, yellow, green scorecard, right?
So green was, we’re pretty close on track.
Yellow was, we were maybe halfway there.
And red, man, we really kind of blew that one.
Alvaro Cuba came up with a light green, which puts us sometimes somewhere between green and yellow, which I like.
So with that, Alvaro, tell us how we did.

Alvaro Cuba Yeah. Okay, let’s go with the first. We said industry 5.0 and we meant by that that there was going to be a lot of focus on people to help industry 4.0, which was technology.
And we really think that people is the one who makes things happen and has to be there to enable any technology that we bring.
So we said there will be a lot of emphasis on skilled trade, a lot of emphasis on frontline workers, skilled development and resilience and new roles, people had to be in new roles.
So I’m sure you felt it because there has been a big gap of number of people, skills.
So there has been a lot of talk in the year about all these topics.
So I think we hit it in the nail. So I think we deserve a green on this one.
What do you think, folks? Green?

Ed Ballina I’m there with you, I think we hit that one squarely, squarely on the nose.
So we said, hey, connectivity, right?
As this AI thing grows, right, we’re going to not just start focusing on individual manufacturing or warehousing or use cases.
We want to push that out through the whole supply chain and outside of our enterprise into our customers or suppliers, et cetera.

Alvaro Cuba How about the second?

Ed Ballina So we thought, hey, we’re gonna see an expansion from pure machine health, kind of what Augury has really created a new category around, and we’re gonna start shifting or seeing a growth into process health.
This has been interesting.
So we thought we would see the expansion go into supply chain planning, quality control, maybe some of the functions that surround pure manufacturing as this thing starts scaling across the enterprise.
And we thought that AI and connectivity would be the foundation with smart manufacturing or for first manufacturing.

So how did we do?
Well, this was Alvaro’s great call here in terms of the color.

You know, we made a lot of progress with AI adoption, right?
But full end-to-end integration really didn’t go very far.
Some of that is because there’s been some questions about how effective these large-scale AI projects are, and a little bit more focus on agentic solutions.
But there’s still a lot of interest, a lot of work in progress.
And I would say it would give us a light green, right?
A little bit better than yellow, but not green all the way.
So, Alvaro, how’s that sound?

Alvaro Cuba Yeah, I think it’s not all the way to bright, but light.
Let’s leave it at that.
About the third one, it was about sustainability.
And what we said is that it was going to be a priority, but not as sustainability as per se, but it was going to be sustainability, meaning lines running better, efficiency.
Reduction of waste and improve on performance.

However, sorry to say it, Ed, but I think this one we deserve a red because unfortunately, I think it’s unfortunate, but understandable, sustainability was deprioritized for the most part in 2025.
There was a lot of things we said, mainly people.
A lot of hype on AI and technology, and a lot of competing priorities with growth and cost and all that.
So this was deprioritized.

Ed Ballina Right. Yeah, yeah, wrong this one.
But, you know, one I think, you know, silver lining is in AI, right?
There’s a recognition that that is a way to help sustainability.
And the other, you know, tiering of the numbers is the price of crude oil is down almost 20 percent versus last year, folks.
So the huge economic imperative has whittled down a bit.
But yeah, the red is well deserved.
So let’s move on to brighter colors.

Productivity and production.
Why did we say about that?
We felt the companies had to balance productivity and production simultaneously because we really embedded a lot of cost, right, during the COVID years and the productivity challenges have really struggled.
So the balance might shift, but you got to make gains in both.
So, we thought that companies would face this issue, this dilemma of pushing productivity while still trying to increase production demand, right?
Because sometimes productivity takes on the look of eliminating production assets that are not that efficient.
But if you’re not meeting capacity needs, then you’re kind of in a dilemma.

So how did we do on this one?
Well, companies started down this path, but there were a lot of headwinds, right?

There were still issues with supply chain and getting goods from the market, et cetera.
And companies are still struggling with the payout of some of their AI initiatives.
And they’re trying to balance both goals, right?
But it’s a very, very tough situation.
So I would say we give ourselves a yellow, right?
Because there was movement in that direction, but I don’t think to the degree that we expected or we needed.

Alvaro Cuba Yeah.

So there we have our predictions. You heard how we did it from green to light green to red to yellow, but to be completely open, I think we missed, totally missed one big one that has had a lot to do in the year, which is the cost pressure.

It comes from tariffs, comes from long supply chains and moving products from other countries.
Commodities went up and down.
We normally have changes in supply chain, but this year was specifically high.

So there you have our predictions. And by the end of 2026, we’ll come back and we’ll tell you what happened to that.
Yes.