having worked in shops alongside automatic welders its a toss-up at best. See vendors like Fanuc and Motoman will say just about anything to get the bid for a process automation contract. 50k cycles per hour? sure. maintenance period every 25 years? why not. seamless switching between pulsemig, pulseGMAW and cupped tig? you know it. Vision system? it can see through time buddy, this robot does eeeverything.
the problems start when your shop retools without a cycle time analysis, makes small tweaks to existing metal profiles without updating the bots, or finds out robots aren't magic money saving golems. for me its been the last one because every shop Ive been in will literally run an autowelder until the teeth in the gears sound like an empty bag of cheetos and the tool path leaves about an inch of over-weld and spatter. the overweld and quality issues get the grinder treatment from a line worker whos pulled out to do lots and lots of reworks so your cycle time is now bob's cycle time. now eventually the setup to pulsemig wont make sense anymore or nobody can remember how to switch it to GMAW or a customer needs a mig joint so more tweaks happen until your $250k bot is now just a pneumatic arm that shoots metal boogers at a joint and sends it to rework.
no shop wants to spend money on a programmer or mechanical maintenance unless the machines literally swinging around in a fiery puddle of its own hydraulic.
I've found that whenever an industry makes a fundamental shift, businesses take a long time to properly adapt. They might jump into the deep end of the pool feet first, and only start thinking about swimming lessons as they're sinking to the bottom.
In your shop the simple mistake is that it's no longer a "welding shop", it's a robotics shop that happens to do welding. Robot maintenance is a thing, and it's a different specialisation to welding, even if the robot is doing welding.
In the IT space, I see this with the public cloud. It's not just someone else's data centre that you're renting. It's a dev-sec-ops integrated platform, basically a new "distributed operating system" that needs an entirely different bag of tools, training, and even corporate structure to support.
Just this morning someone form a legacy "DBA" team asked me: "Where do I go to add a new user to the database?"
Err...
That's not a click-ops task any more. She would have to know how to use Git, a JSON templating language, PowerShell, and know about PaaS configuration automation via deployment pipelines.
The cloud is no longer managed by teams like Networks + DBAs + Sysops! It is now site reliability engineers (SREs) that handle most of those cross-cutting concerns. The entire IT department of that enterprise needs to be restructured and their staff retrained (or made redundant!) to manage a public cloud.
I run a 4kW fibre laser, but I've also worked alongside enough trades and technicians I'm also: remote hands; infrastructure engineer; maintenance fitter; electrician; cable hauler; SQL database manager; Delphi hacker; desktop support; VoIP telephony support; network engineer; refrigeration technician, as well as being a certified boilermaker-welder tradie with 26 years in the trade.
We just replaced the Y-axis ball screw on the laser, but only after it was slopping about 0.6mm.
I know shops where expensive equipment is sitting idle or broken because they can't find, and can't afford to pay for, someone with my experience.
the problems start when your shop retools without a cycle time analysis, makes small tweaks to existing metal profiles without updating the bots, or finds out robots aren't magic money saving golems. for me its been the last one because every shop Ive been in will literally run an autowelder until the teeth in the gears sound like an empty bag of cheetos and the tool path leaves about an inch of over-weld and spatter. the overweld and quality issues get the grinder treatment from a line worker whos pulled out to do lots and lots of reworks so your cycle time is now bob's cycle time. now eventually the setup to pulsemig wont make sense anymore or nobody can remember how to switch it to GMAW or a customer needs a mig joint so more tweaks happen until your $250k bot is now just a pneumatic arm that shoots metal boogers at a joint and sends it to rework.
no shop wants to spend money on a programmer or mechanical maintenance unless the machines literally swinging around in a fiery puddle of its own hydraulic.