Augmented Ops

For decades, the United States bet that invention alone would keep it competitive. Twenty years ago, the US led in 60 of 64 key technologies. Today, China leads in 57 of them. The country no longer has an invention problem, it has an industrialization problem.

In this episode, Elisabeth Reynolds, Professor of the Practice at MIT and Tulip advisor, sits down with her MIT colleague Chris Love, chemical engineering faculty, co-director of the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing, and faculty at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Together they discuss their new book, Priority Technologies: Ensuring U.S. Security and Shared Prosperity, with a foreword by Nobel laureate Simon Johnson. The book spans six chapters: critical minerals, semiconductors, biomanufacturing, quantum, advanced manufacturing, and drones, with manufacturing as the connective tissue across all of them.

The conversation unpacks why "invent here, make there" has caught the US flat-footed in semiconductors and drones (the CHIPS Act and Skydio's export-control fight are the cautionary tales), and why biomanufacturing risks the same trajectory when roughly 80% of US biopharma already runs through Chinese production. Chris makes the case for distributed micro-factories that could cost 10 to 100 times less than the half-billion to two-billion-dollar plants the industry builds today, citing MIT spinout Sunflower Therapeutics as a working example. They explore the emerging "technologist" role, a nurse-practitioner equivalent for the shop floor that bridges engineering knowledge and operations, and revisit MIT's Leaders for Global Operations program as an existing model for that kind of hybrid talent. Throughout, they return to the half-million unfilled US manufacturing jobs that demand a new educational pipeline.

For operations leaders, the throughline is clear: the next era of US competitiveness will be won on the production side, not the invention side. Software, AI, and automation are what make smaller, faster, distributed manufacturing possible, and they're how, in Chris's words, manufacturing gets to be cool again.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Made in America — the 1989 MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity book that Liz and Chris repeatedly return to as a touchstone

Vannevar Bush's 1945 report Science, The Endless Frontier, which set the postwar US R&D vision

MIT's Work of the Future initiative and the follow-on Production and Innovation Economy (PIE) study

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/o0i8GNXp28Y

Augmented Ops is a podcast for industrial leaders, citizen developers, shop floor operators, and anyone who cares about what the future of frontline operations will look like across industries. This show is presented by Tulip, the Frontline Operations Platform. You can find more from us at Tulip.co/podcast or by following the show on LinkedIn.
Special Guest: Chris Love.

Three months into the agentic AI shift, manufacturing finds itself at the same inflection point a generation of CEOs faced at the dawn of digital: lean in now, or wait for someone else to prove it works. The cost of waiting just got steeper.

Enno de Boer, Senior Partner at McKinsey and co-founder of the World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Network, returns to Augmented Ops to talk with Natan Linder, Tulip's co-founder and CEO, about why this is not the next wave of IoT, 3D printing, or even mobile. Enno argues AI is a general purpose technology on the order of electricity, the first one in roughly a century, and that most industrial organizations are still treating it like a tool layered on top of yesterday's workflows.

The result, he says, is Amdahl's Law in action: speed up one element by 20%, leave the system intact, and you get zero results. That, in his read, is why 2025 returned almost no measurable AI impact in industry, and why the new normal of a major supply-chain disruption every single year demands more than another wave of pilots and chat interfaces. The real work is to rebuild the operating system underneath, the AI system, the data system, and a new division of labor between humans and agents.

The conversation gets specific. Enno walks through John Deere's agentic material-availability and replanning system, a top-five electronics supply chain that hit a billion dollars of impact by collapsing planning cycles tenfold, and a coding-agent deployment in financial services where a night shift of agents drove 200x throughput while humans handled validation by day. He is blunt about what has decayed since the Toyota Production System era, why the 80/20 inversion of direct-to-indirect labor in modern factories has gone out of check, and why the future is distributed, hyper-local, and personalized down to an "order of one." McKinsey's Rewired playbook anchors the strategy lens: identify the two or three economic leverage points that drive 70% of the value, then build the systems to go after them.

For operations leaders, his ask is a single metric to optimize against: clock speed. Enno's ambition for the next decade is a 100x increase in manufacturing clock speed, and he is direct about what it will take to get there.

Models think. Systems act. Manufacturing's job, starting now, is to build the systems.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/KYGu7oOMh2A

Augmented Ops is a podcast for industrial leaders, citizen developers, shop floor operators, and anyone who cares about what the future of frontline operations will look like across industries. This show is presented by Tulip, the Frontline Operations Platform. You can find more from us at Tulip.co/podcast or by following the show on LinkedIn.
Special Guest: Enno de Boer.

Geopolitical pressure is reshaping how the US buys and builds for defense. Nick Sinai of Insight Partners breaks down the shift from cost-plus to commercial procurement, the rise of venture-backed defense tech, and how to move fast without losing safety.

In this episode of Augmented Ops, host Erik Mirandette, Tulip's Chief Business Officer, is joined by Nick Sinai, Managing Director at Insight Partners and co-author of Hack Your Bureaucracy. Before Insight, Nick spent nearly six years inside the Obama administration as US Deputy CTO, where he led the Open Data Initiative and helped stand up the Presidential Innovation Fellows program.

Nick breaks down what's actually changing in defense procurement under the second Trump administration, the rise of venture-backed defense tech now drawing tens of billions of dollars a year, and the shift from cost-plus to commercial-products buying. He explains why the traditional 15-year acquisition cycle no longer matches the pace of technology, and how companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and Palantir are reshaping what it means to be a defense prime.

The conversation also explores the tradeoff every modern supplier into defense has to navigate: how to move faster on cost and speed without junking the safety and compliance requirements that exist for good reason. Nick offers a grounded view from someone who's lived inside both the bureaucracy and the venture world, including what it actually takes for reform to stick across administrations.

The headlines are full of speeches about speed. Nick lays out what's genuinely different this time, what's likely to regress to the mean, and where operations leaders supplying into the defense base should be paying attention.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Qu7bCfNpraA

Augmented Ops is a podcast for industrial leaders, citizen developers, shop floor operators, and anyone who cares about what the future of frontline operations will look like across industries. This show is presented by Tulip, the Frontline Operations Platform. You can find more from us at Tulip.co/podcast or by following the show on LinkedIn.
Special Guest: Nick Sinai.

Manufacturing is entering a new phase of AI adoption, one where intelligent systems don’t just generate insights but take action in context. In this episode of Augmented Ops, host Mason Glidden, Tulip’s Chief Product Officer, is joined by Olga Stroilova, Group Product Lead, and Pete Hartnett, Group Product Manager, to discuss how agentic AI is redefining what’s possible on the factory floor.

Together, they unpack the evolution from predictive and generative AI to agentic systems capable of autonomous, goal-driven behavior while keeping people firmly in the loop. They examine why many pilots stall before production, how governance and culture shape adoption, and why “human oversight by design” is becoming the new standard for responsible AI in manufacturing.

Drawing from Tulip’s own roadmap and customer experiences, the team highlights how features like AI Composer, Tulip Agents, and context-aware workflows are helping users close the insight-to-action gap, scale AI safely, and unlock new forms of operational leverage.

Rather than imagining a future without people, the episode points to a more realistic vision of AI in manufacturing: one where systems evolve, but human judgment remains the foundation of progress.

Augmented Ops is a podcast for industrial leaders, citizen developers, shop floor operators, and anyone else that cares about what the future of frontline operations will look like across industries. This show is presented by Tulip, the Frontline Operations Platform. You can find more from us at Tulip.co/podcast or by following the show on LinkedIn.
Special Guests: Olga Stroilova and Pete Hartnett.

What do a floating barge the size of four aircraft carriers, a Shell refinery, and the future of energy resilience have in common? They all depend on knowing, with precision, how much life is left in the steel.

In this episode of Augmented Ops, host Natan Linder sits down with Thomas Leurent, CEO and co-founder of Akselos, to unpack the often-overlooked world of structural performance management and why it might be the most important form of physical AI you've never heard of.

Thomas shares how Akselos helped Shell unlock over half a billion dollars in value on a single FPSO by using physics-based digital twins to skip a costly dry dock. He explains the technology behind it: a proprietary approach that runs structural simulations 100,000x faster than traditional finite element analysis by blending machine learning with physics, built over 20+ years since the technology was pulled out of MIT.

The conversation goes deep on what physical AI actually means in industrial settings, why hallucination is simply not an option in high-stakes environments, the role of humans in process industries (especially in emergency scenarios like what's unfolding in the GCC), and how data sharing — or the lack of it — is holding back offshore wind and the broader energy transition.

Thomas also shares a bold prediction: just as algorithmic efficiency transformed mechanical simulation, it will do the same to AI, making large language models far cheaper to run, potentially leading to an overcapacity of computing infrastructure in the years ahead.

If you think "structural performance management" sounds dry, wait until you hear what a $500M dry-dock skip, 52,000 workers with zero casualties, and the future of energy supply chains have to say about it.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/cmhRmhyrU-Y

Augmented Ops is a podcast for industrial leaders, citizen developers, shop floor operators, and anyone who cares about what the future of frontline operations will look like across industries. This show is presented by Tulip, the Frontline Operations Platform. You can find more from us at Tulip.co/podcast or by following the show on LinkedIn.
Special Guest: Thomas Leurent.