Michael Finocchiaro - The Real State of AI in Design and Manufacturing

Описание: Short Summary
In this talk at the 2025 Future of Engineering Summit, ‪@MichaelFinocchiaro‬ cuts through the “marketing noise” surrounding #AI and explains the actual changes taking place in engineering software. He describes the shift as being akin to every company building two factories: one for products and one for intelligence. He identifies three solution waves — #plm copilots, agentic workflows and the industrial metaverse — and demonstrates how start-ups are driving innovation beyond the 'big three'.


Full description
In this session from the Future of Engineering Summit 2025, Michael Finocchiaro — a strategic advisor and technology evangelist with over 35 years' experience in CAD and PLM — shares a clear-eyed overview of what is real and what is hype in AI for engineering and discrete manufacturing.

He argues that the future holds 'two factories' in every company: the physical factory that builds products and the AI factory that builds intelligence. This AI factory is not some distant vision; copilots, workflow agents and AI-powered simulation are already forming its assembly lines on engineers' desks today. He also makes the case that PLM systems are becoming the infrastructure layer through which this intelligence connects to product reality.

He outlines three major classes of solutions:
PLM copilots (assistive AI): natural-language and visual search across product data, documentation and bills of materials (BOMs)—already appearing in offerings from major PLM/CAD vendors.
Secondly, agentic workflows, which increase autonomy from 'advise and enrich' to supervised actions and full end-to-end automation. He highlights Synera’s demo as a powerful example of this.
The industrial metaverse involves real-time digital twins that combine simulation, the Internet of Things (IoT), and factory models. This is enabled by standards such as OpenUSD and ecosystems such as NVIDIA Omniverse, with data flowing back into PLM/MES.

Finally, Michael highlights the rapidly growing startup landscape (with over 300 companies having raised billions) and predicts the next phase: cognitive, closed-loop engineering systems that reason across design, simulation, and manufacturing, pushing towards self-validating workflows and the transformation of 'engineering intelligence' into 'business intelligence'.