What’s Driving the Market in Inspection Equipment

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At SMTAI 2025, we polled several automated inspection experts to learn more about their market and emerging customer needs. Among others, we spoke with Nick Fieldhouse, OEI product manager for automated inspection systems, Omron, and Allen Phung, head of sales, America, Koh Young America.

We asked them about the current market drivers for automated inspection, including AOI, SPI, and AXI, and sought more details about trends in inspection using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“The most dramatic changes today revolve around the implementation of AI,” Fieldhouse said. “Most customers are looking to understand how different companies leverage AI’s power to support their production lines. We're using AI to reduce the time they spend at the machine. Our goal is to speed up overall inspection.”

At Koh Young, we still see the same drivers, particularly this year,” Phung said. “Reshoring due to tariffs is enabling a lot of new capacity. There's still a lot of old equipment out there, and people are choosing to do new equipment changeovers.”

These answers suggest that customers are seeing value in smarter and/or faster inspection machinery. In North America specifically, these trends seem to be driven by the need for capability and capacity associated with reshoring. We wanted to know what specific features are currently driving their sales.

Phung said everyone is asking about AI technologies, and that Koh Young is in a unique position to leverage AI software in its systems to further automate processes and eliminate quite a bit of human interaction, which can also enable even more machine-to-machine communications.

To continue reading this article, which originally appeared in the December 2025 edition of SMT007 Magazine, click here.