Lucian Boldea, President and CEO of Honeywell Industrial Automation, discussed workforce excellence in a July 2024 appearance. He stated that the COVID-19 pandemic and a global demographic shift with more workers retiring have created a "skill gap and an experience gap." Boldea said that workforce excellence is now "an intricate part of automation" and "totally inseparable" from it, in contrast to a past approach where worker safety and human resources were considered separate from machinery. He described workforce excellence as keeping workers safer, more efficient, and training them faster, making their lives "simpler, more predictable, more efficient and more proficient."