Manufacturing Matters Podcast

Manufacturing Matters Podcast Insights and interviews discussing trends, innovations, and technologies. https://linktr.ee/m_mp

09/04/2026

“It’s really a needle in a mountain of needles and you just want to find one.”

For most manufacturers, the hard part of AI isn’t the model — it’s the knowledge locked in the heads of veteran engineers. In this special Automate 2026 episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Jimmy Carroll sits down with ReshapeX’s co-founder and CEO Juan Aparicio and Novanta’s Ajay Sharma (ATI Industrial Automation) for a candid case study of how the two companies turned decades of tribal knowledge into a working AI agent.

Novanta’s ATI tool changers can be configured millions of ways — the team pegs a single product line at roughly 7 million combinations — and pinpointing the one right configuration used to take days of back-and-forth with application engineers. Sharma and Aparicio walk through how they codified that expertise into an “agentic application engineer” that returns the right answer in minutes, why they set out to be the 5% of enterprise AI projects that succeed rather than the 95% that fail, and the build-versus-buy calculus that led Novanta to partner with ReshapeX.

The conversation digs into the unglamorous work behind a reliable agent: gamified, week-over-week testing with real customer queries, a human-in-the-loop feedback loop that moves the system from probabilistic to deterministic, a knowledge graph that reasons on relationships instead of semantics to reach 99.99% precision, and continuous evals to guard against model drift. They close with a playbook for other manufacturers — define the real problem, secure executive cover, get your solution fit right, and treat it like a high-risk project — plus why codifying knowledge before it walks out the door may be the most important thing an established company can do.

Link to the full episode in the comments.

08/21/2026

“The value is moving from the metal to the code.” As manufacturers add AI and software to their products, the old one-time hardware sale is running out of runway when it comes to improving AI models for manufacturing. For Thales’s Dale Hopkinson, the real opportunity — and the real risk — sits in how that software and AI actually get monetized: not as a bolted-on price tag, but as a flexible, recurring business built to change as fast as the technology does.

In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin sits down with Hopkinson, Senior Product Manager for Cloud Services at Thales, to unpack why software is decoupling from hardware, what that means for OEMs retasking and repackaging existing equipment, and why Bain projects AI, software, and data will add roughly $70 billion to the market within five years.

The conversation covers the organizational groundwork companies need before they can monetize AI — P&L ownership, dedicated staff, and roadmaps that survive personnel changes — plus the shift from subscription tiers to usage-based and hybrid pricing, the operational lift of managing renewals, entitlements, and channel relationships, and why protecting AI models and training data on the edge is now a board-level conversation.

Link to the full episode in the comments!

08/07/2026

“The more we can do with it, then the more likely the humanoids are going to take off and be adopted.”

Connectors rarely get top billing. Nobody designs a device around a connector — yet these humble components increasingly determine whether a smart factory, an edge deployment, or a humanoid robot works. As manufacturers push more data, more power, and more intelligence through the same shrinking footprint, the demands on interconnect technology are evolving as fast as the systems they serve.

For this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Aaron Hand sits down with Ed Garstkiewicz, HARTING’s Senior Business Development Manager for Emerging Markets, at Automate 2026 in Chicago to talk about the fast-changing world of industrial connectivity. They dig into smart connectors that add sensors, status indicators, and intelligence right at the connection point; the constant balancing act between miniaturization and ruggedization; and why connectors may be one of the keys to making humanoid robots lighter, more efficient, and easier to repair.

“A humanoid robot is the perfect example for the need for smart connectivity,” Garstikiewicz notes. “The wiring and connectors make up 5 to 10% of the weight of a humanoid. So if we can add functionality to the connector and reduce the need for other systems, we’re lowering the weight and improving the efficiency of the humanoid robot.” This could be a deciding factor in how quickly humanoids get adopted.

If you’ve never given much thought to what’s at the end of the cable, this conversation makes the case that the connector is quietly becoming one of the smartest components on the factory floor.

07/30/2026

“AI needs data, and industrial data is not available on the general internet.”

“It’s not like you do either AI or manufacturing. If you’re smart, you optimize what you have. You would be amazed how much you can gain by just retrofitting your old asset.”

AI is finally moving “from PowerPoints to the real world” on the factory floor, but it can’t deliver when fed siloed, proprietary data. For Schneider Electric’s Andre Marino, the foundation comes first: open, software-defined automation that harmonizes industrial data, so manufacturers can train AI models on their own operations instead of buying technology and getting frustrated.

In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Jimmy Carroll sits down with Marino at Automate 2026 in Chicago to talk through what it takes for manufacturers to modernize and compete — from the hyperscale “AI factories” racing to add capacity to the small and midsize companies that make up 85% of the U.S. manufacturing base.

The conversation covers the growing competition for energy between AI data centers and factories and why the answer isn’t adding capacity alone while digging into digital twins for upgrading lines with minimal downtime, closing the skills gap by drawing IT talent into the OT world, and a task-first (not form-first) take on humanoid robots and world models. Additionally, the discussion covers what Marino would like to see in U.S. robotics legislation, and his playbook for smaller manufacturers: know what you’re solving for, digitize, automate, optimize — and repeat.

Link to the full episode is in the comments.

07/24/2026

“What we bring to the table is we understand how to take the data, do real-time compute, and turn it into knowledge. So, you got raw data coming in, you got knowledge coming out.”

Modern machine vision and imaging systems can throw off a firehose of data far faster than a general-purpose computer can absorb it. Concurrent EDA founder Ray H***e, PhD, has spent two decades on the other side of that firehose, taking algorithms and moving them into electronics so the compute happens right at the sensor, in real time.

In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Jimmy Carroll sits down with Dr. H***e to talk through the latest in real-time processing. Dr. H***e discusses how AI has reshaped the way his team builds — including generating 600,000 lines of code in a single month — and why he keeps telling engineers to “dream big” and prototype what used to feel impossible.

The conversation covers when GPUs like NVIDIA Jetson win versus when FPGAs are the only option, such as scenarios involving submillisecond latency, 1,000+ fps cameras, and 50-to-100 Gbps data rates in real-world high-speed applications from additive manufacturing melt-pool monitoring to laser tracking and 3D metrology. The discussion also covers open smart cameras, MIPI sensors, image signal processing techniques, and how the same “firehose” thinking applies to RFSoCs for defense; time-sensitive networking as “Ethernet 2.0”; and a UDP/IP core that moves data from programmable logic to Python far more efficiently than Linux. Dr. H***e closes with the diagnostic questions he asks every customer: where is your data coming from, what are you trying to extract, and where is it going?

Link to the full episode in the comments

07/17/2026

“The end goal for a lot of clients is this dream of a lights-out factory. Before you get there, there’s a stepping stone in between — and it’s this connected factory.”

Autonomous mobile robots spent years confined to warehouse aisles. Now, driven by a persistent labor shortage and a wave of AI, they’re moving into the heart of the factory — handling the material movement between “islands of operation” that people increasingly don’t want to do, and taking on mission-critical roles once considered too risky to automate.

In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Jimmy Carroll sits down with Rockwell Automation’s Sheldon Zimmerman (Global Head of AMR Sales) and Isabelle Durso (Business Manager, AMRs) at Automate 2026 in Chicago to unpack where mobile robotics is really headed and what it takes to get robots up and running on a plant floor.

The conversation covers how AI is reshaping AMRs from the sensor up to the orchestration layer, the rise of mobile manipulation (and where humanoids do and don’t fit), why simulation and digital twins are becoming essential for de-risking deployments, and the real hurdles to adoption: IT/OT integration, physical infrastructure, and the brownfield-versus-greenfield divide. Zimmerman and Durso also make the case for starting small with pilots, the evolving safety standards that let robots and people share a floor, and why the “connected factory” — MES and ERP talking through a single orchestration layer — is the practical stepping stone toward lights-out manufacturing.

Link to the full episode in the comments

07/16/2026

You're not going to lose your job to AI. You'll lose it to someone who learned to use AI better than you.

Winn Hardin sits down with Omkar Joshi and Gabby Lichtenberg of BSI at Automate LIVE for a candid conversation on AI governance — and why getting it right is a competitive advantage, not a compliance burden.

Watch their full discussion in the comments.

07/14/2026

What's coming in AI over the next two to three years may be bigger than the internet.

Jimmy Carroll brings together Darcy Bachert of Prolucid Technologies, Charlie Long of Zebra Technologies, and Michele Silva of Reynolds & Moore for a live panel at Automate on where AI is genuinely transforming manufacturing — and where it isn't ready yet.

Watch their full discussion on agentic AI, robot safety, real-world ROI, and more in the comments.

07/13/2026

Most AI pilots never make it to the production floor.

Winn Hardin sits down with Nagesh Puppala, General Manager of Robotics at Intel, at Automate LIVE to dig into what production-ready AI actually requires.

Watch their full discussion on physical AI safety, software-defined automation, agentic robotics, and more in the comments.

07/02/2026

This episode of Manufacturing Matters features Winn Hardin in conversation with Denise Chludzinski, vice president of business development at Miller Resource Group, a leading recruiter specializing in food and industrial automation manufacturing sectors. They discuss current talent trends, labor market challenges, and growth opportunities in manufacturing for 2026.

Link to the full episode in the comments

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