About this episode

The episode discusses the impact of AI at IMTS 2026, featuring insights from Ryan Kelly on distinguishing valuable AI tools from marketing hype.

AI is going to be everywhere at IMTS this September, and if you walk the floor without a filter, it'll make your head spin. So we brought in someone whose whole job is helping manufacturers tell the real thing from the marketing fluff. Ryan Kelly, VP of Technology at AMT, joins us to break the noise into something usable. He walks through a simple way to sort every AI claim you'll see into three layers: the hyperscalers and cloud platforms laying the foundation, the AI native tools that couldn't have existed a few years ago, and the embedded AI features showing up as new buttons in the CAD, CAM, and ERP systems you already run. Then we get into physical AI, the part that actually matters for a machine shop. It's the loop that takes information from the physical world, lets an AI reason on it, and sends a decision back to the machine or the robot in close to real time. Nick's tool load monitoring, Paul's native machine monitoring in ProShop, Mike's managing 60 jobs a day by exception, they're all versions of the same idea. The catch is data. If the grammar of your data isn't good enough, the AI will hand you an answer you can't trust. Ryan also previews what AMT is building at the…

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