The Digital Transformation process, intended as the process of changing existing business models with new digital technologies, is still in its early stages in the European furniture industry, with few leading furniture manufacturers that fully integrate digitalization in their processes.

For the vast majority of the European furniture manufacturers surveyed by CSIL within its research activities, digital transformation, such as the development of IoT, additive manufacturing, 3D printing, or Artificial Intelligence (AI), is still in progress or just started (60% and 10% respectively). Only 20% of respondents have a well-advanced or fully integrated digital transformation roadmap in place.

Typically, companies that initiate a digital transformation process first introduce solutions to production machines, including the adoption and interconnection of robots for certain steps in the production process. Secondly, they make investments to implement softwares to gather, manage, and secure data from all business areas (such as ERP systems). Finally, companies adopt advanced solutions, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to analyse the collected data.

A notable disparity exists between the offer of technologies and their effective utilization within the European furniture industry scenario.
This gap primarily stems from challenges in securing appropriate skills, a still limited knowledge of understanding of technology, and a managerial culture that may not always be readily receptive to change. But, in the medium term, investments in digital transformation are expected to increase rapidly, doubling their share of the company’s turnover, according to the CSIL sample. The investments will move towards the integration of business areas with digital solutions to achieve the concept of smart factory. Increasing market shares will also be tapped by smart products, which, will increase by two digits yearly from now up to 2030.

The areas where companies invested more in digitalization include cyber security, cloud computing, and robotics. It is important to highlight that both cyber security and cloud computing are among the 2030 targets of the Digital Decade Policy Programme, according to which at least 75% of EU enterprises should adopt in their operations cloud computing services, big data, and/or AI.

Artificial intelligence, viewed as a set of technologies, holds particular importance for tangible potential business applications in different business areas, from production processes to streamlining and service offerings for the furniture industry. One of the areas where AI is more common is the use of machine learning algorithms that analyse a vast amount of consumers’ data from social media websites to identify (and predict) the most popular product trends, improve the customization, and tailor to individual needs, and to create new and innovative materials.