In Stay Sharp Episode 97, The State of AI in Today’s PLM Solutions, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant welcome Michael “Fino” Finocchiaro, PLM expert, technology evangelist, and advisor to leading companies on digital transformation, AI, and strategy. Fino joins Jonathan and Juliann to discuss how the PLM environment is changing, particularly thanks to emerging startups and AI.
How PLM’s Biggest Players Are Tackling New Frontiers Today
Jonathan begins by summarizing the evolution of PLM, noting that the PLM landscape started with a handful of organizations: the main players—PTC, Siemens, and Dassault Systèmes—and some others with PLM technology tied to their popular ERP systems. Over time, PLM/ERP combinations fell out of favor, Aras and other new names appeared, and cloud PLM prompted a major market shift.
The first question to Fino concerns the next new frontier of innovation for PLM systems today. While quantum computing is on the horizon, he says, “Obviously the biggest play at the moment is AI and what are we going to do with it.” Jonathan adds, “There’s still startup activity beyond AI. That’s the thing we should all take away. There’s more to this frontier PLM than just AI. That’s getting all the hype, getting all the attention, and there are things to pay attention to there. They’re real. But there are other things that we should think about.” Possibly the most interesting point about the future of PLM is that it’s likely to continue to evolve, just as it has throughout its history.
Fino then digs into what the same three main players are doing now. For PTC, it’s been slow going, in part because their CEO doesn’t have any PLM background. But, Fino says, “They do have a strategy. They have a nice framework which they call Advise, Assist, and Automate in terms of the agency you give to your AI.”
Siemens, Fino explains, doesn’t take wild swings at new functionality. “They like to just do it slowly, make sure it works, add a little bit more so that their customers aren’t jostled too much,” he says. While they’re not doing anything wildly unusual or cutting-edge, their PLM product is solid. Fino adds, “Sort of like that old adage about IBM, no one gets fired for buying software from Siemens. The stuff works.”
Dassault, one of Fino’s former employers, has what he calls “Probably the industry leading story in terms of a unified platform where they have, not the entire portfolio, but a good percentage of the portfolio on the same user experience with the same paradigm.” Though Dassault hasn’t made any big announcements or movements on AI with PLM, Jonathan notes that Dassault chooses to add a variety of small components to their functionality that might not initially make sense, but that over time form an important part of a bigger picture.
What The PLM Innovators Are Offering
Fino calls out a number of smaller companies with interesting AI developments that he’s keeping his eye on. Onshape is one, especially Leo AI for Onshape, a design advisor that apparently even taught the man who created Onshape something new. He’s also watching Duro, a cloud-native PLM platform whose founder believes AI should be able to do your integrations for you. Another is Propel, a new Razorleaf partner, which is built on Salesforce and has delivered the first agentic framework.
Aras—who just appeared as a leader in the Forrester Wave Report on PLM for Q3 2025—are not only innovators, but also potentially disruptors. The company is rooted in open source, which allows for innovations from many different directions. Fino explains, “Aras is a bit disruptive in the fact that they were probably the first one to start talking about RAG, retrieval augmented generation, in the context of PLM because they have a RAG augmented chat bot to look at product data.” Aras is also developing agentic AI and enabling work on model context protocol (MCP) that will allow AI to speak to Aras and use it. “What’s interesting about ARAS,” Fino says, “is they don’t mind playing with the other kids. If Siemens or Dassault is already in the playground, they don’t care. They’re just, we’re going to create a digital thread and connect the dots for you.”
Learn More About How PLM Continues to Evolve
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why Fino and previous podcast guest Rob Ferrone (the PLM Plumber) think what everyone needs is the devil’s advocate AI agent, why Autodesk might be a mid-market alternative for PLM but not a major player, what companies Fino identifies as some of the most exciting in the very active PLM-related startup arena, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 97: The State of AI in Today’s PLM Solutions and join us each week for a new podcast.
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