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Companies turning to machines to fill jobs

Business owners will tell you they have jobs available but not many takers, but the worker shortage is actually a good thing for the automation industry.

OLD FORGE, Pa. — Bernie Andreoli runs Three Points Automation out of his home in Old Forge. He's been fielding a lot of calls lately from businesses that are shorthanded.

"It really ramped up. And we got busy quick," Andreoli said.

Companies that can't fill positions with people are looking to fill them with machines instead.

Andreoli told us about a job he recently did in New Hampshire designing a sorting system for a large company.

"It was all about how can we get our products to our trucks in our docks more efficiently without workers?"

Jobs getting replaced by machines is a scary thought for a lot of workers, but Andreoli says most of the time, you still need eyes and ears to watch those machines.

"I don't foresee this army of robots moving in and taking over everyone's jobs. I've been doing this a long time, and it's always what you hear from people. It isn't happening, and I don't believe it is going to happen," Andreoli said. "You still need people to do jobs, and there are some jobs you want to eliminate the type of work the person is doing—something repetitive, something that might injure them."

Right now, it seems like there's not a huge appetite for those types of jobs anyway. That's why many businesses can't find enough people to fill them.

Andreoli says by automating the more tedious jobs, the workers who are still there can move on to more valuable and more rewarding work.

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