AI Across The Product Lifecycle Podcast

What happens when the “Claude Code moment” reaches hardware engineering, supply chain, and the factory floor? In this episode of AI Across the Product Lifecycle, Michael Finocchiaro speaks with two French industrial AI founders building directly into that shift: Matthias Berahya-Lazarus, CEO & co-founder of Cognyx Thibaut Wilhelm, CEO & founder of Oplit Cognyx is building an AI engineering...

Text-to-CAD. Autonomous simulation. Agentic workflows. AI copilots for PLM. Engineering teams “10x faster.” Most of it still sounds like science fiction. But what happens when you put two founders building real AI-native engineering software in the same conversation? In this episode of AI Across the Product Lifecycle , Michael Finocchiaro speaks with Pradyut , co-founder of Bild , and Martin Bieli...

BOM Wars, Part 2: Why Engineering, Manufacturing, ERP, MES, Service, and AI Still Can’t Agree The BOM debate is back. And somehow, it got even more dangerous. In this Future of PLM panel, Michael Finocchiaro brings together Christine Longwell, Gus Quade, Brion Carroll, Pat Hillberg, David Schultz, and Oleg Shilovitsky for a high-energy debate on one of the most persistent fractures in product life...

🚨 PLM just had a major market signal. For the first time since 2008, Gartner has published a Magic Quadrant for PLM — and Aras is now positioned alongside the traditional PLM giants. In this breaking-news episode of AI Across the Product Lifecycle , I sit down with Josh Epstein, CMO of Aras , to unpack what this means for the PLM market, why digital thread has become central to enterprise softwar...

What happens when some of the most respected voices in PLM gather in a Spanish vineyard to discuss AI, digital transformation, trust, community, and the future of engineering? In this special Share PLM Summit 2026 edition of The Future of PLM Podcast , host Michael Finocchiaro is joined by Jos Voskuil, Oleg Shilovitsky, Rob Ferrone, Patrick Hillberg, Nina Dar, and Maria Morris for a candid, unscri...

AI in manufacturing does not fail because the demo is bad. It fails when the answer cannot be trusted. In this episode of AI Across the Product Lifecycle , Michael Finocchiaro speaks with Fay Goldstein, Co-Founder and CEO of Bardin AI , and Scott Lionello, Co-Founder and CPO of Omnae Technologies , about where industrial AI is really going: beyond chatbots, beyond copilots, and into the operationa...

What happens when AI moves beyond chatbots and starts reshaping the actual tools engineers, architects, and designers use every day? In this episode of AI Across the Product Lifecycle , Michael Finocchiaro speaks with Chloë Guidi of Qonic and Moritz Rietschel of Raven about the AI-native future of CAD, BIM, and AEC workflows. Qonic is building a modern, cloud-based BIM platform from scratch, inclu...

What happens when AI, virtual reality, and spatial computing move beyond demos and start reshaping real engineering work? In this episode of AI Across the Product Lifecycle , Michael Finocchiaro speaks with Jay Wright , Co-Founder and CEO of Campfire , and Oluwaseyi “Shay” Sosanya , Co-Founder and CEO of Gravity Sketch , about the future of immersive engineering workflows. This is not a “metaverse...

Riverside Event Title Physics Has a ChatGPT Moment: AI, Simulation, and the Future of Engineering What happens when AI stops guessing and starts solving physics? In this episode of AI Across The Product Lifecycle , I’m joined by Hardik Kabaria , co-founder and CFO of Vinci , and Andy Fine of the Fine Physics Consortium , for a sharp discussion on one of the biggest shifts in engineering software:...

Riverside Event Title Product Memory: The Missing Layer Between PLM, Digital Thread, and AI Agents Riverside Event Description Everyone talks about the single source of truth . Then the real product decision happens in a meeting, spreadsheet, email, Teams chat, supplier exchange, or inside someone’s head. In this episode of The Future of PLM , I’m joined by Oleg Shilovitsky of OpenBOM, Rob McAvene...

What happens when AI hits both sides of the engineering equation: design and sourcing ? In this episode of AI Across the Product Lifecycle , Michael Finocchiaro sits down with Adar Hey, CEO and co-founder of Jiga , and Or Israel, CEO and co-founder of Bananaz , for a grounded discussion on where AI is actually creating value in engineering right now. Bananaz is building an AI layer on top of CAD t...

What happens when engineering teams suddenly have the equivalent of 10,000 new AI coworkers? In this Day 2 Threaded Miami session, Daan Goossens of CoLab lays out a sharp version of the problem: AI can massively increase productivity, but if companies do not have the right collaboration, context, and decision-making structure in place, they will not scale output. They will scale chaos. That framin...

What if the missing piece in industrial AI is not another copilot, but the underlying knowledge and orchestration layer that physical product companies still do not have? In this Day 2 Threaded Miami session, Lucy Hoag of Violet Labs makes that case from a hardware-first perspective. Her argument is that the physical world is getting dramatically more complex, multidisciplinary, and AI-enabled, wh...

What if the real weak point in the digital thread is not the software stack, but the documents people keep creating to survive around it? In this Day 2 Threaded Miami session, Addy First of Quarter20 makes that argument directly. She points out that while everyone talks about connected systems and AI in manufacturing, a huge amount of real work still happens outside those systems in PowerPoints, W...

What if the real problem in electromagnetic simulation is not user workflow, but the solver itself? In this Day 2 Threaded Miami session, Masha Petrova of Nullspace makes exactly that argument. Her claim is blunt: the core electromagnetic solvers most of industry still relies on were built decades ago for very different computing environments, and they are no longer good enough for the scale and c...

What if the real problem with engineering simulation is not physics, but the fact that the tools are still too complex, too fragmented, and too dependent on a handful of experts? In this Day 1 Threaded Miami session, John Zinn of CognaSIM lays out that case clearly. He argues that simulation teams have become a bottleneck inside engineering organizations because the software is hard to use, hard t...

In this Day 2 Threaded Miami session, Rut Lineswala of BQP makes that case head-on. He argues that the weakest link in the digital thread is often the simulation layer itself, where engineers still face huge compute demands, long runtimes, and practical limits that force them to make design decisions with extra safety factors instead of better data. His point is simple: if modeling and simulation...

What if the biggest bottleneck in manufacturing is not engineering itself, but all the manual work that happens after the design is done and before the business can actually move? In this Day 1 Threaded Miami session, Mayank Makwana of Reeva makes that case directly. He argues that speed is the only sustainable advantage in manufacturing, but most large companies are still slowed down by the invis...

What if factory data worked less like a pile of dashboards and more like Instagram or TikTok — surfacing the right operational insight at the right moment without forcing people to hunt for it? In this Day 1 Threaded Miami session, Jeff Tao of TDengine makes exactly that argument. He explains why industrial teams are still drowning in dashboards, alerts, and raw time-series data, while the real ne...

What if the real problem in supply chains is not visibility at the top, but the broken collaboration happening lower down the stack where the real work still runs on emails, spreadsheets, and mismatched systems? In this Day 1 Threaded Miami session, Scott and Dan Linonello of Omnae deliver one of the more memorable presentations of the event: a father-and-son talk built on decades of firsthand sup...

What if one of the fastest ways to build a breakthrough engineering product is to stop reinventing infrastructure and start building on the right components? In this Day 1 Threaded Miami session, Jonathan Girroir of Tech Soft 3D gives a practical overview of the SDK and component technology landscape behind modern CAD, PLM, PDM, CAE, AEC, CAM, and digital twin applications. The core message is cle...

Why are so many AI-for-engineering projects still failing, even after all the hype? In this Day 1 Threaded Miami session, Andy Fine gives a sharp overview of the simulation landscape, the mission behind Fine Physics Consortium, and the uncomfortable reality that most engineering organizations still do not have the data, process, or domain grounding to make AI work in physics-heavy workflows. His c...

What actually kills most engineering software startups is not the tech. In this Day 1 Threaded Miami session, Ralph Verrilli of Next Stage Ventures delivers a blunt, highly practical talk on what it really takes to build, fund, scale, and eventually sell an engineering software company. Drawing on his background as a mechanical engineer, startup founder, operator, investor, and M&A advisor, Ra...

What does Aras actually stand for in a PLM market still dominated by legacy architecture, painful upgrades, and disconnected data? In this episode, Josh Epstein, Rob McAveney, and John Sperling lay out the Aras view of the market, the product strategy behind Innovator and Innovator Edge, and why they believe the future of PLM is not just better data management, but a genuinely operational digital...

What happens when someone stops waiting for the engineering software world to create the right startup event and just builds it? In this episode, Michael Finocchiaro lays out the thinking behind Threaded, a conference series designed to give engineering and manufacturing startups something the market has been missing: a focused environment where founders can get in front of customers, investors, s...