Who is Driving Smart Manufacturing in 2025?

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Jun 24

Everyone loves to talk about what technologies are transforming manufacturing—AI, IoT, MES, digital twins, and the like. But here’s the question no one seems to answer: who’s actually leading this transformation? Who’s driving the change, wrangling the complexity, and getting people to buy in (or at least stop rolling their eyes in meetings)? Is it the CIO? The COO? Some new role with “digital” in the title that didn’t exist three years ago? In a world full of buzzwords and bold ambitions, understanding who’s behind the wheel of smart manufacturing initiatives matters more than ever. Because no matter how advanced your tech stack is, if the leadership isn’t aligned, your transformation is going nowhere fast.

The New Champions of Smart Manufacturing (COO vs. CTO)

In the manufacturing sector, digital transformation initiatives are most commonly piloted by operations leaders rather than purely IT. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Smart Manufacturing survey, more than half (51%) of manufacturers say their smart manufacturing programs are owned and driven by operations executives such as the COO or VP of Operations. Another 38% report these initiatives are led by technology leaders like the CTO or head of IT. (Yes, the stereotypical rivalry between Ops and IT for budget and glory lives on – but at least they’re fighting over who gets to do transformation!) This leadership split highlights that success in smart manufacturing requires both domain expertise on the factory floor and digital savvy in the tech realm.

Other research by Manufacturing Leadership Council in 2023 echoes this balance. In one industry survey, the person responsible for leading Manufacturing 4.0 strategy was most frequently an operations executive, followed by the CIO’s office or a collaborative team effortmanufacturingleadershipcouncil.com. The underlying logic makes sense: operations leaders ensure new technologies actually improve throughput, quality, and agility on the line, while IT and technology leaders bring the data infrastructure, systems integration, and innovation needed to power those improvements. In practice, many companies foster close partnerships between COOs and CIO/CTOs.

Centralizing the Transformation Effort

Beyond individual titles, manufacturers are formalizing how they organize for digital change. According to the same Deloitte survey, over half (52%) of manufacturers have now created a central team or working group to lead smart manufacturing initiatives across the enterprise. Instead of leaving innovation to a patchwork of plant managers or ad-hoc project teams, these companies have a dedicated transformation office (often reporting to a senior executive) driving the effort. This central team coordinates between IT and OT (operational technology) groups, prioritizes projects, and spreads best practices from one pilot site to the next. In effect, it acts as an internal hub to turn isolated “smart factory” experiments into a scaled, cohesive program.

Hand in hand with central teams, many firms are setting up formal Smart Manufacturing Centers of Excellence. About 44% of manufacturers have established a smart manufacturing CoE to serve as a knowledge and training nerve center for digital initiatives. These centers of excellence typically develop playbooks, run pilot labs or model factories, and provide expert resources that different plants can tap into. The payoff? A faster diffusion of new technologies and standards across global operations, and fewer wheels re-invented at each site. As one might quip, why force every factory to solve the same problems on its own, when they can call the “center of excellence hotline” for help?

The impetus to centralize is especially strong at larger manufacturers. Big enterprises often have dozens of facilities and legacy systems; without a central guiding coalition, digital transformation can devolve into chaos or stall out. Smaller manufacturers (SMEs), on the other hand, often lack the luxury of large cross-functional teams – their “central team” might just be a single tech-savvy plant manager wearing multiple hats, or an external consultant. This difference in scale shows up in practice: large firms are far more likely to have formal transformation offices and CoEs, whereas many SMEs rely on informal champions (like an operations director keen on tech) and may progress more slowly or sporadically. Nonetheless, even mid-sized companies are recognizing the need for coordination. Consulting groups note that successful digital transformations, regardless of company size, tend to have clear leadership and governance structures from the outset, rather than a scattershot approach.

Enter the CIOs and CDOs: A Team Sport, Not a Silo

While operations leaders often take point on manufacturing transformation, the era of siloed initiatives is fading. Digital transformation is increasingly a multi-headed beast – and winning organizations treat it as a team sport. We’ve touched on COOs and CTOs, but CIOs (Chief Information Officers) deserve a shout-out too. In many companies, the CIO is evolving from back-office IT manager to frontline digital strategist. In fact, a 2023 Survey from CIO Magazine (across industries) found that 84% of IT leaders believe CIOs are more likely than other executives to be leading digital transformation efforts. The manufacturing sector is no exception: CIOs are stepping up to co-own initiatives like smart factories, especially where enterprise-wide data architecture, cybersecurity, and systems integration are concerned. They often partner closely with operations to ensure that technology investments actually align with business needs on the plant floor. As a result, the lines between IT and OT are blurring – many CIOs now spend as much time on the factory floor (virtually, at least) as they do in the data center.

Another relatively new player in the mix is the Chief Digital Officer (CDO). This role has gained traction as companies recognize that digital transformation merits singular focus. The CDO’s mandate is typically to break down silos and drive digital innovation across the business. Globally, nearly half of companies have a CDO in place as of mid-decade. In manufacturing, some larger firms have appointed CDOs or similar transformation executives to orchestrate Industry 4.0 programs enterprise-wide – acting as a bridge between the traditional IT and operations organizations. For example, a CDO might coordinate a multi-plant rollout of IoT sensors or data analytics platforms, ensuring that both the tech side (CIO/CTO) and the business side (COO/operations) are in lockstep.

It’s worth noting that regional nuances exist in these leadership trends. European and Asian manufacturers, especially heavy industrial and automotive companies, were early adopters of formal Industry 4.0 programs (often spurred by government initiatives like Germany’s “Industrie 4.0”). Many of these firms established central digital manufacturing teams years ago. In some Japanese and German companies, it’s not uncommon to see plant managers or engineering heads heavily involved in digital pilots, alongside corporate IT – reflecting a culture of shop-floor continuous improvement (think Kaizen meets AI). In North America, the push might more often come top-down from a corporate center of excellence or the C-suite. Regardless of region, however, the pattern converges on cross-functional leadership: the most successful smart manufacturing transformations globally tend to have strong executive sponsorship and collaboration across functions. It’s the classic “two-in-a-box” approach – or sometimes more than two – bringing together diverse expertise to tackle a very complex challenge.

Owning the Future of Manufacturing

At the end of the day, the question of “who leads” digital transformation in manufacturing is answered by another question: “who should lead it?” The emerging best practice is joint ownership: operations and technology executives co-steering the ship, backed by dedicated cross-functional teams. Manufacturers that treat smart manufacturing purely as an IT project, or purely as an operations project, risk missing half the equation. Instead, those leading the pack have realized it’s a collaborative journey – one that often starts with a clear mandate from the top (a CEO or COO saying “this is our future”), and is driven day-to-day by a coalition of roles.

We see COOs championing digital as a means to boost agility and throughput, CIOs ensuring the data and infrastructure can scale securely, CTOs pushing the envelope on new tech like AI and IoT, and plant managers providing ground truth on what actually works on the factory floor. Some companies even involve HR leaders to reskill workers and communicate change, recognizing that new tech is only as good as the people who use it. And of course, measuring impact through KPIs keeps everyone honest about what value these efforts deliver. The broader manufacturing ecosystem – consultants, tech providers, industry groups – plays a role too, but ultimately it’s the manufacturers themselves that must own their transformation. The relatively low reliance on third-party change managers (only one-third using them) underscores this point.

In an industry known for continuous improvement and pragmatic problem-solving, the digital transformation wave is being met with the same ethos. Manufacturers are learning that going “smart” is not a one-off software install, but a continuous leadership challenge. The leaders emerging at the forefront are those who can bridge the worlds of machines and data, people and processes – whether their business card says COO, CIO, CDO or plant supervisor. As we approach the next horizon (AI-driven factories, autonomous operations, you name it), the companies ahead of the curve will likely be those where no single person is “in charge” of transformation in isolation – instead, it’s ingrained in the leadership culture across operations and IT together.