Over the next five to 10 years, autonomy in non-road equipment applications is expected to develop incrementally and through use-case-specific automation, rather than a single transition to full autonomy.  

That’s the takeaway for AEM members, their industry peers and the customers they serve, according to a newly issued whitepaper from the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) Futures Council and its Autonomy & Automation Vision Team. 

The Future of Automation & Autonomy was released just ahead of the 2026 AEM Annual Conference, set to be held this week in Tucson, Arizona, where Futures Council representatives will be in attendance to provide additional insights on the future of autonomy and automation, as well as other critical areas shaping the future of non-road equipment manufacturing. 

“The next several years is not expected to bring a single moment when farms or construction sites become ‘fully autonomous,’” said AEM Senior Director of Agricultural Services Austin Gellings, who served as the staff liaison for AEM’s Autonomy & Automation Vision Team and helped author The Future of Automation & Autonomy.  “Expect the future to arrive in layers. Some tasks will become nearly unsupervised. Others will remain deeply human. Most will sit in between, with machines assuming more responsibility for execution while people retain responsibility for intent, oversight, safety, exceptions and business judgment.” 

“AEM members and their peers should expect highly repetitive, structured and labor-constrained tasks will move first, while more dynamic or consequential tasks may become more automated. However, they will ultimately remain in the hands of a person,” added Erol Ahmed, vice president of Communications at AEM member company Built Robotics, who served on AEM’s Futures Council and Autonomy & Automation Vision Team.  

The Future of Automation & Autonomy also unveiled 11 trends reshaping automation and autonomy today and outlined a realistic pathway toward autonomy for the non-road equipment manufacturing industry by 2035, among other takeaways. 

Additional key points from the paper include:  

• If automation can reduce human exposure to high-risk environments, improve situational awareness, prevent collisions, reduce fatigue-related mistakes, or allow remote operation in hazardous conditions, it has a meaningful public-interest case. 

• Autonomy is not a human-removal strategy. It is a capability strategy.

• Advanced automation and autonomy will create a layered operating model.

• Machines perform more of the work.

• AI systems support planning and optimization.

• Humans supervise, approve, maintain, verify and intervene.

• Dealers and technicians become more central to uptime.

• The operating model will increasingly shift from one person operating one machine to one person supervising multiple machines, supported by AI-enabled planning, diagnostics, dispatch, and decision support. This will not eliminate the human role. 

“The future of automation and autonomy will be built through disciplined progress, not hype,” explained Grant Good, senior director of product development at AEM member company AGCO Corporation, and a member of the Autonomy & Automation Vision Team. “The industry will move fastest where the job is clear, the environment is controlled, the value is obvious, and the support model is ready. It will move more slowly where tasks are dynamic, trust is fragile, liability is unclear, or interoperability and workforce readiness lag behind technology.”