May 2026

I spent the week in DC, partially at NIST’s standards for AI in Manufacturing conference. Two thoughts: AI is developing incredibly quickly and (as a result) the future seems closer than ever.

One measure of the latter is that back during my SU days, I kept on talking about the reason I started Authentise – the plane crash caused by a faulty part they couldn’t get a replacement for in time. I always ended on a picture of the future where we have a smooth process from identifying that a part is breaking (through sensors), all the way through qualified parts built before the plane has even landed. 

It’s been years since I talked like that, bogged down by the realities of running a business and industry slumps. But AI has given us the opportunity to dream again. What’s more, this is the first time I talked about that future in a conference full of peers, because I know that we’re moving towards that vision more quickly than ever before, thanks to AI. 

You can see that in the progress the team is making on features that cover the whole process from design capture all the way to the detail of production. 

Design Capture is now easier because we added features in Threads that allow you to search through drawings much more easily. That’s an additional feature on top of the RREQAM set we won an award for at Rapid.

Not only are we relying on AI-powered OCR to enable us to find hand written text in documents, but we’re only able to build them at speed because of AI. We haven’t increased the number of tickets, but the amount of code per ticket was about 2x last year. 

That might be one reason why we can build design intake features while simultaneously releasing tools that allow us to track tools in more detail than ever. Specifically, you can now define and store custom field values directly on your tools. This lets your team capture the specific data points that matter most to your operations; whether that's material specs, calibration values, maintenance history attributes, or anything else unique to your workflow.

Those values can then be updated on the fly in your app, while you’re processing the build plate for example. They’re displayed wherever there’s value in knowing them, at the stage of the process where they’re being used. 

The breadth and detail of those changes is truly exciting and seeing them makes me think that we can truly get to where we wanted to when we started this journey. AI is a serious boost, but it wouldn’t be possible without you and the incredible team delivering these features. 

Hope you enjoyed the official start to the summer. You’re in for a wild ride.