When AI Meets Sales, Support & Supply Chain: Omnae & Bardin AI

AI in manufacturing does not fail because the demo is bad.It fails when the answer cannot be trusted.In this episode of AI Across the Product Lifecycle, Michael Finocchiaro speaks with Fay Goldstein, Co-Founder and CEO of Bardin AI, and Scott Lionello, Co-Founder and CPO of Omnae Technologies, about where industrial AI is really going: beyond chatbots, beyond copilots, and into the operational workflows that actually run manufacturing businesses.Bardin AI is building an application engineer for industrial automation sales and support teams, helping them answer complex technical questions without escalating everything to senior engineers. Omnae is building supply chain collaboration software that allows AI agents to operate safely across real suppliers, buyers, orders, invoices, and messy enterprise data.  The conversation goes straight into the hard parts of industrial AI:trust, auditability, determinism, human-in-the-loop workflows, knowledge graphs, API costs, token burn, procurement risk, sales engineering bottlenecks, and why “just add a chatbot” is not enough when mistakes touch contracts, general ledgers, supply commitments, or customer trust.Fay and Scott also discuss how AI is changing startup operations and software development, why young professionals need to show AI fluency rather than fear AI replacement, and why mid-market manufacturers may adopt practical AI faster than large enterprises waiting for top-down transformation programs.The big takeaway: the next wave of industrial AI will not be about flashy demos. It will be about operational relief.Fewer escalations.Faster quoting.Cleaner supplier collaboration.Better support workflows.Safer automation.More trust in the decisions AI helps make.This is a grounded, founder-level conversation about how AI is moving into the less glamorous but highly valuable parts of the product lifecycle: sales, support, procurement, supply chain, and the industrial back office.Topics covered: industrial AI, agentic AI, supply chain AI, procurement, pre-sales engineering, industrial automation, knowledge graphs, AI trust, human-in-the-loop workflows, manufacturing software, digital transformation, enterprise AI, startup innovation, and the future of AI across the product lifecycle.