Aras Community Event 2026--Rise of the Agents

A first summary of my three days with the Aras community in Miami. These PLM events always return me to the time when I did this sort of work--manually. Then my first taste of computers digitizing the bill of materials as a first step in our data management journey. Unfortunately, that company hit a big bump in the road and I was invited to try other things--at other companies. Aras product managers showed how LLMs trained on the data within the app along with proper governance worked with agents to perform a number of tasks. Tasks in many cases that would require days of pain-staking work from a human. While I heard from an analyst in the market that they thought this was all painfully slow, I'd offer the thought that a company does not want to outpace its customers. Most will not want to jump into the deep end immediately. As always, this podcast was sponsored by Ignition from Inductive Automation.