In Episode 64 of Razorleaf’s Stay Sharp podcast, Trends that Shaped Digital Engineering and Manufacturing, co-hosts Jen Ferello and Jonathan Scott talk with a special guest: occasional podcast co-host and Razorleaf’s CEO, Eric Doubell. The trio review the state of digital engineering and manufacturing in 2024, covering the highs, lows, and especially the surprises they saw in the past year.
2024’s Hits
Jonathan starts the discussion of “the hits” with digital twins. The concept has been popular for a couple of years, he says, but this year, “The number of vendors I don’t think of as traditional PLM vendors or in the digital product space who are getting into digital twin, that’s been a surprise.” As an example, he cites NVIDIA, which is most known for leadership in artificial intelligence (AI). Though it’s not known as a vendor in the PLM space, the company has recently been advertising a digital twin builder.
Another big topic in the industry has been digital manufacturing or “Industry 4.0,” aka, the fourth industrial revolution, which generally describes the integration of digital technologies into manufacturing and industrial processes. Eric agrees about the prevalence of the subject in the past year, noting he’s heard a lot about Industry 4.0 in Europe, but less in the United States, until more recently. Jonathan speculates that the reason for the surge in discussion about the topic has to do with companies and individuals realizing they’ve been pouring focus and energy into the digital engineering side of things. “I think a lot of folks are saying, wait a minute, we haven’t been giving the same attention to the manufacturing side, and we’ve got all this great data that we’re not using. So to me, it feels like catch-up,” Jonathan says.
2024’s Misses
Jen brings up additive manufacturing as a topic she’s seen contracting in the past year—at least the turnout hasn’t met the very high expectations people had for the technology. Eric’s thought is that might be a case of minor growth but also consolidation in the business. The trio explores potential reasons for the “miss,” including manufacturers wanting to customize or personalize the manufacturing processes more than implementing the technology straight out of the box. Another part of the challenge, Jen says, is doing additive manufacturing at scale, because while there are some technologies to automate those processes, doing it at profitable scale is difficult.
Cloud PLM is another topic that Jen, Jonathan, and Eric think underperformed in the past year, achieving steady-state growth only, instead of the boom in adoption they might have expected. Part of the reason, Eric says, has to do with it being “an incremental technology. It’s not a whole new way of doing things.” Jonathan points out that a motivator for being on the cloud is making your data more accessible to AI—which Eric suggests as a marketing approach for the industry: “If the vendors get their messaging right about how you can take more advantage of AI because of the cloud, that’ll help them migrate more customers to it.”
2024’s Big Surprise
What no one anticipated was, Jen says, was AI sucking all of the oxygen out of the room in 2024. As Eric put it, “Everyone’s talking AI and everything else is getting left in the dust.” Jonathan admits to expecting AI would be met with reluctance and hesitance, much like cloud was, but he was surprised to see everyone jumping right into it instead. Jen says, “Maybe why AI has taken off so quickly is because everybody’s super excited about the potential, and other than some stories about hallucinations and stuff, we haven’t yet run into ‘was that a disaster.’ It hasn’t yet fallen apart.”
But what has really surprised the trio is that PLM vendors and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), who’ve had generative design for years, weren’t messaging about AI at all in 2024. Jonathan notes that they weren’t calling it AI when those capabilities came out, but machine learning. “I think the OEMs were trying to do what they thought the market wanted,” he says. “And maybe are surprised, like I am, that the market’s more okay with it than anybody anticipated.” Or potentially, the vendors were late to invest in it and they’re working on it now, with more messaging to follow.
Learn More About The Hits and Misses of 2024
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including how working with AI is like working with an intern fresh out of college, the danger of PLM companies not getting the messaging right around AI, which acquisitions in the PLM space were notable and why that’s about the digital thread, predictions for 2025, and more.
Check out the full conversation in Episode 64, Trends that Shaped Digital Engineering and Manufacturing, and join us each week for a new podcast.
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