If you buy stocks in a slowdown, it's a good idea to ensure they will have good growth prospects coming out of recession. In that context, it's a great idea to look at the industrial automation and software companies that power industrial automation. They represent a growth industry whose best days are yet to come. 

To understand the full benefit of automation, it's essential to be aware of "Industry 4.0," also known as the "fourth industrial revolution." Simply put, it refers to the confluence of the digital and physical worlds. One example comes from creating a so-called "digital twin" of a physical asset. Say a gas turbine or a bottling plant is digitally twinned. The Internet-of-Things technology generates a mass of data from the physical asset, which is then analyzed digitally and modeled using the twin. In this way, artificial intelligence can better model, guide, and predict the behavior of the physical asset. For example, data from the bottling plant line could be digitally modeled and simulated to predict better when the equipment needed servicing -- doing so would reduce costly downtime and improve productivity.

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Source Fool.com