Operations Calling 2025: Looking back on the Future of Operations

By the time the lights dimmed on the mainstage, our headquarters in Somerville was standing room only. The quiet before the first keynote felt charged, filled with engineers, innovators, and business leaders who shared the sense that manufacturing was on the verge of another shift.

Operations Calling 2025, held October 7–8, brought more than 750 people together to explore how technology, data, and human expertise are reshaping the foundations of industrial work. The event focused on real-world ideas, systems that help people solve problems faster and organizations learning to evolve continuously rather than transform once and move on.

Even weeks later, that sense of momentum endures. Conversations that began in those sessions about the role of AI in operations, building open and composable systems, and scaling success responsibly continue to ripple outward, guiding projects and strategies long after the event ended.

The morning’s three keynotes framed the event around vision, architecture, and scale.

Our Co-founder and CEO, Natan Linder, opened his keynote with a vision for how AI and human ingenuity together are redefining what productivity means in manufacturing. He described a future where technology expands decision-making and amplifies the work of people closest to the process. The factories that thrive will be those that think with their people; where human creativity and digital intelligence evolve side by side.

In that vision, continuous transformation becomes a sustained capacity, powered by systems that are composable, adaptive, and grounded in AI.The goal has shifted from automating faster to learning faster, closing the gap between what technology can do and what people are empowered to achieve.

Tulip’s Chief Product Officer Mason Glidden continued that thread, showing how those same principles are being built directly into Tulip’s platform. He announced a series of innovations that embody this vision, describing an environment where AI, data, and governance are built around people — positioning Tulip’s architecture as a living system that evolves because the people using it do.

Then came the real-world proof. Steve Maddocks, VP of Global Manufacturing at Stanley Black & Decker, shared how the Stanley Production System (SPX) has redefined what operational excellence looks like at scale. Over the past several years, SPX has grown from a single-site initiative into a global framework connecting fifty plants and more than a thousand applications through Tulip’s platform.

The success of SPX lies in its design: composable, standardized, and human-centered. Every team has the tools to adapt processes locally while contributing to a shared foundation of best practices and data. That approach to scalability reflects the essence of continuous improvement — progress driven by people and supported by systems that evolve with them.

By the end of the first morning, the focus was clear: progress depends on systems that keep people in the loop and learning together.

From Concept to Context

The conversation around AI at Operations Calling felt different this year. What once sounded theoretical had become a shared language: a framework for understanding how intelligence can work inside the complex, human-centered systems that define manufacturing.

Attendees were eager to learn ways to make AI accountable, governed, and safe to scale. It was a shift from curiosity to fluency; a recognition that intelligence belongs in operations only when it earns trust.

That theme came into sharper focus during the panel Breaking the Loop: AI Beyond the Hype, where Pattie Maes of MIT Media Lab joined technologists from AWS and Databricks to discuss how AI is evolving in industrial environments. The conversation highlighted the difference between experimentation and application, exploring how manufacturers can balance ambition with accountability as AI becomes embedded in daily operations. The panelists emphasized that industrial settings demand transparency, explainability, and systems that learn responsibly from human feedback.

The compliance community echoed that message with clarity. In Life Sciences and AI at the Crossroads, a former FDA regulator joined leaders from Smith+Nephew and Vericel to outline the frameworks emerging to make AI adoption safer; from Computer Software Assurance to new risk-based validation methods. Their perspective reflected the maturity of the conversation: progress depends on structure as much as innovation.

Even outside regulated sectors, the dialogue was pragmatic. Manufacturers discussed how they’re embedding AI into inspection, training, and scheduling; integrating intelligence with data already on the floor rather than building separate systems. The consensus was steady and sober: operational AI succeeds when it understands the work it supports.

Those insights created the foundation for what came next. The ideas discussed on stage would soon take form; in code, in architecture, and in the hands of the people using it.

Embedding Intelligence

In his keynote, Mason Glidden announced new capabilities that bring AI to life inside operations. Composable Agents introduce digital teammates that help frontline teams handle repetitive tasks, generate summaries, and analyze production signals within governed workflows. Built to keep people in the loop, they lighten routine work so attention can shift to improvement and problem-solving.

OpsMoto extends visibility to the enterprise level, bringing deployments, assets (apps and automations), and user activity into a single, unified view. By consolidating data across instances and workspaces, OpsMoto turns scattered information into decision-ready intelligence — making it easier to spot adoption patterns, identify opportunities, and act with clarity.

AI Composer is now available to all users and adds template support. Teams can bring their own branded logic and best practices directly into AI Composer, transforming SOPs and documents into interactive Tulip apps while preserving standards. It accelerates builds, improves consistency, and aligns new apps with the way operations already run.

That same mindset extended beyond Tulip’s releases. Across the Partner Pavilion, attendees saw how openness and interoperability are shaping the next generation of industrial intelligence. Zebra’s Connected Factory Framework, developed in partnership with Tulip, demonstrated how edge devices and scanners feed data directly into contextualized workflows. NVIDIA and Overview AI showcased adaptive vision systems capable of recognizing variation and improving quality inspection in real time. Sartorius and Mitsubishi Electric explored how contextualized process data and modular connectivity enable faster iteration across global operations.

Each example had its own focus but all pointed in the same direction: a manufacturing ecosystem defined by transparency and shared context.

👉 Learn more about these releases and what they mean for manufacturers in What’s New in Tulip: Fall 2025.

Hands-On and Human

The ideas discussed on stage came to life when attendees saw them in action. Among the most talked-about activities was the AI Passport, a six-part guided journey through Tulip’s embedded AI tools. Participants moved from translating work instructions to generating insights and summarizing production data, each step showing how intelligence can integrate seamlessly into the flow of work.

Built around Tulip’s commitment to explainability, the Passport emphasized understanding as much as capability. Every output was traceable, and every interaction reinforced how humans remain central to the process. More than 140 participants completed the challenge, each walking away with a physical AI Passport and a clearer sense of how applied intelligence feels in practice.

The Agent Builders Challenge, held the day before Operations Calling officially began, brought together a small group of Tulip builders for an experiment: to see what would happen when operations experts got early access to Composable AI Agents and were asked to explore what’s possible. The result was a hands-on workshop where participants used agents to tackle real manufacturing scenarios. Within a few hours, ideas turned into working solutions — from a Shift Handoff Agent that generated prioritized to-do lists for incoming teams to a Governance Agent that reviewed Tulip apps and suggested improvements before deployment. The focus wasn’t competition but discovery, showing how imagination, data, and the right tools can turn expertise into practical, scalable innovation.

The AI Passport and the Agent Builders Challenge together showed how AI for operations turns philosophy into practice — enabling people to experiment, learn, and build with confidence.

👉 For more examples of how AI came to life at the event, see AI in Action: 5 Highlights from Operations Calling.

If AI was the spark of the week, composability was the structure that gave it form. Across sessions, conversations, and workshops, the same message kept emerging: the most resilient manufacturing systems are built to change.

Composability has long been part of Tulip’s DNA, but in an era where AI is reshaping manufacturing, it has taken on new weight. It has evolved from a software concept into a mindset about how people, processes, and technology evolve together. The companies presenting in Somerville shared a common understanding: every improvement depends on systems designed to adapt.

AstraZeneca’s operational leaders offered a clear example in their presentation on The Lean Digital Playbook. Their approach to validation and deployment uses modular building blocks to connect regulated sites around the world. Each local team can adapt applications to its own needs while maintaining compliance within a shared framework. That balance between flexibility and control — between autonomy and assurance, is what allows innovation to scale safely.

The same spirit carried into the Partner Pavilion, where companies demonstrated how openness turns connectivity into capability. From edge analytics to adaptive vision and modular connectivity, every demo reinforced a single idea: when systems speak the same language, innovation accelerates.

Each demonstration underscored a broader truth: openness multiplies value. The companies leading this next phase of transformation focus less on building the biggest systems and more on designing the most connected ones.

Composability tied every conversation at Operations Calling together. It linked the vision of continuous transformation to the architecture that makes it possible and the outcomes that prove it works. Modern operations now function the same way — modular, iterative, and always in motion.

Continuous transformation emerged as one of the defining themes of Operations Calling 2025 — the next evolution of a familiar idea. Digital transformation once implied a finish line; continuous transformation treats progress as an ongoing state.

In many ways, the concept extends the philosophy of Kaizen into a connected, data-driven age. The difference is scale and speed. Instead of discrete projects or lean events, transformation now happens in real time, across networks of people, systems, and sites.

In aerospace and defense, Avon Technologies demonstrated how continuous transformation can operate within complex, highly regulated environments. Their composable, agile approach aligned IT and operations around a single platform, replacing legacy systems with one that supports daily Kaizen and iterative improvement. By embedding flexibility into their architecture, Avon accelerated product release times from three weeks to one hour and achieved a tenfold improvement in inventory turns within two years. Their story reflected the essence of continuous transformation — scaling improvement not as a project, but as a daily practice.

Terex offered yet another lens on Designing for Disruption at a global scale. By standardizing data models and aligning visibility across plants, they’ve moved from reactive firefighting to predictive decision-making. Teams now improve in parallel rather than sequentially — an approach that turns experimentation into an enterprise-level rhythm.

Taken together, these examples reflected a shift in how manufacturers think about progress. Continuous transformation acts less as a program and more as an operating posture. Scale becomes the proof that the system works. When improvement is built into how teams think, share, and act, transformation evolves from initiative to instinct — the way the factory runs.

Operations Calling 2025 closed much as it began — with momentum. Across two days of keynotes, workshops, and discussions, one idea came into focus: progress in manufacturing comes from a shared commitment to evolving how work gets done.

The sessions and conversations throughout the week reflected that shift. Every discussion — from AI’s practical applications to the mechanics of scaling composable systems — pointed toward the same reality: transformation is continuous and collective, powered by people who are learning faster together.

A few days after the event, we continued the conversation on Augmented Ops, where Natan Linder and Madilynn Castillo reflected on what Operations Calling revealed about the state of manufacturing and where it’s headed next. For us, the message was clear: the foundation is in place, the technology is ready, and the work ahead is to scale it — thoughtfully, and together.

Operations Calling wasn’t an ending point; it was a signal of what’s next. The collaboration, experimentation, and curiosity we saw across every session continue to push our industry forward. As we look ahead, we’re carrying that same energy into everything we do — building systems that help people work smarter, together.

🎙️ Listen to the Operations Calling 2025 recap episode on Augmented Ops → AugmentedOps.com
🎥 Watch all Operations Calling 2025 sessions on demand → tulip.co/operations-calling/on-demand