Coming from an engaged scholarship approach, this paper reflects on insights from seven research projects tracing how human-centricity has evolved over a decade in the Swedish manufacturing industry. The paper shows how humans have been framed as skillful workers to recognize them as reflective agents, socio-technical stakeholders, and co-creators. While recent industry and university collaborative initiatives emphasize inclusion and well-being, humans are rarely centered as actors with agency. Instead, the perspective of human-centricity operates as a strategic narrative rather than a transformative principle within a digital context. As such, we argue for a more critical understanding of human-centricity in relation to digital transformation, which continually questions what it means to place the human at the center in a manufacturing organization in a contemporary digital era.