New Business Credit Insights on Investment, Automation, and Risk
Ask most people what’s going on in U.S. manufacturing, and you’ll get a simple story: the sector is coming back. Billions in new investment, headlines about reshoring, talk of a manufacturing renaissance. It’s a good story. It’s just not the whole story.
Experian’s latest Commercial Pulse Report digs into what’s really happening, and the picture is more layered than the headlines suggest. Yes, money is pouring into new plants and projects. But employment and output haven’t kept pace. Meanwhile, automation and AI are reshaping how manufacturers operate, and their credit behavior looks different from what you’d see in most other industries.
If you’re a commercial lender or a risk leader, that gap between “investment” and “output” is worth sitting with. Here’s what the data actually shows.
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How much money is being invested in manufacturing megaprojects in 2026?
The money is real. The output hasn’t caught up yet.
Start with the scale of investment. According to the Manufacturing Megaprojects Tracker there are 59 U.S. manufacturing megaprojects, worth roughly $624.7 billion and tied to about 183,000 jobs. That’s not a rounding error — that’s serious capital moving into the sector.
And it’s not just a handful of massive projects. The number of private U.S. manufacturing establishments has grown by more than 18% since 2016. More plants, more companies, more activity on paper.
But here’s the catch: none of that has shown up yet in actual output. The Industrial Production Index — which tracks real output across manufacturing, mining, and utilities — has been basically flat since 2010. Capacity utilization has drifted downward over the longer term, too. And manufacturing’s overall footprint in the economy has shrunk considerably: from roughly 21% to 25% of GDP back in the 1950s down to just 9.4% today.
So what does that tell you? Not that manufacturing is shrinking — the opposite, in terms of dollars and business formation. It tells you that a lot of this investment hasn’t turned into production yet. Whether it will, and how fast, is the open question.
How has employment in U.S. manufacturing changed in recent years?
Fewer people, more machines – employment tells a similar story to investment dollars from a people angle. Manufacturing employment peaked back in the late 1970s, when more than 19 million Americans worked in the industry. Since 2016, employment has crept up just 2.3% — even while the number of establishments jumped 18%.
Companies are opening. Investment is climbing. But headcount barely moved. Where’s the gap going?
A lot of it is automation. Research cited in the report puts the job displacement from automation at 1.7 million manufacturing positions already, with another 9.3 million U.S. jobs considered vulnerable to AI-driven automation going forward. (Worth noting: these are Tufts Index figures cited in the report, not Experian’s own projections.)
The robots back this up. Annual installations of industrial robots in the U.S. have grown 31% over the past decade, with automakers leading the pack as the biggest buyers.
Put it together and you get a sector where growth doesn’t necessarily mean more people on the floor. It means more machines doing the work, and fewer new hires needed to scale.
How is AI adoption hitting U.S. manufacturing?
Automation isn’t the only technology story here. AI adoption is accelerating too, and quickly.
According to the report, 79% of manufacturers surveyed in 2026 said they were either investing heavily in AI or actively exploring where it fits into their operations. That’s up from 64% just a year earlier. AI-driven automation and optimization also topped the list of digital transformation priorities among the manufacturers surveyed.
Part of what’s driving this is complexity. The share of manufacturers saying most of what they produce is “extremely” or “very” complex jumped from 47% in 2025 to 67% in 2026 — a big move in a single year. When your products get harder to make, the case for AI and automation gets stronger fast.
How to manufacturers utilize commercial credit compared to other industries?
Manufacturers borrow differently than everyone else. If you’re on the lending side: here’s how manufacturers actually use credit according to Experian.
Commercial cards are still the most common financial product across industries broadly. Manufacturers, though, lean more heavily on a different mix — business leases, lines of credit, and term loans show up more often in their portfolios than they do elsewhere.
Experian commercial credit data shows that manufacturing businesses use a more diversified mix of financial products than other industries, relying more heavily on leases, lines of credit and term loans.
Manufacturers also tend to open new accounts more sparingly relative to what they already have, while carrying higher credit lines on the accounts they do hold. In other words: fewer new relationships, bigger commitments within the ones that exist.
Does that different borrowing pattern translate into different risk? Not dramatically. Delinquency trends among manufacturers have tracked pretty closely with other industries. Utilization has been climbing across the board, with manufacturers running slightly hotter than average recently.
Experian’s own risk scores add a bit more texture. Over the past two years, manufacturers have posted somewhat lower Intelliscore Plus V2 scores than other industries — a sign of modestly higher delinquency risk — though that gap has been narrowing. On the flip side, Financial Stability Risk scores suggest manufacturers are actually less likely to default than businesses in other sectors.
Two different risk signals, pointing in two different directions. That’s exactly the kind of nuance a single headline number would miss.
What this all adds up to
Nobody should walk away from this data thinking manufacturing is booming or struggling — it’s doing both at once, in different ways. Investment is way up. Business formation is up. Output and employment haven’t followed at the same pace. Automation and AI are quietly doing more of the work that used to require people. And manufacturers are financing all of it through a different mix of products than most other industries use, with risk signals that cut both ways.
For commercial risk teams, that’s the real takeaway: the old shorthand — more investment means more growth means more revenue — doesn’t map cleanly onto this sector right now. Understanding how manufacturers are actually financing this transition, and how they’re performing along the way, matters more than watching the topline investment numbers alone.
The next chapter of U.S. manufacturing is still being written. The capital is already there. What happens with it — and how commercial credit supports that shift — is the part still playing out.
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The report identifies 59 manufacturing megaprojects representing approximately $624.7 billion in investment and 183,000 jobs.
Yes. Research cited by Experian found that 79% of surveyed manufacturers were either investing heavily in AI or exploring AI opportunities in 2026, compared with 64% in 2025.
Experian data shows manufacturers use a more diversified product mix and rely more heavily on leases, lines of credit and term loans than businesses in other industries.
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