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40 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2025 F E AT U R E A RT I C L E by N o l a n J o h n s o n , I - C o n n e c t 0 07 What's Driving the Market in Inspection Equipment? 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 prod- uct manager for automated inspection systems, Omron, and Allen Phung, head of sales, America, Koh Young America. We asked them about the current market driv- ers 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 differ- ent 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."