What We Learned at IMTS 2026

We Were in the Back Corner and It Was Fine

IMTS 2026 was our first time exhibiting at McCormick Place. Four of us made the trip: Ian, Kjel, AJ, and me. We got assigned a booth in the back corner of the back corner of a show with 1,900 exhibitors and somewhere around 100,000 attendees over six days. It is the kind of scale that does not make sense until you are standing inside it, and we were about as far from the main entrance as you could get without leaving the building.

We watched the foot traffic at the booths near the entrance and it was a different world. But the people who found us were looking. They had already walked the main floor, seen the big booths from the enterprise vendors, and were still looking for something. A few of them told us they specifically came to the back sections because that is where the smaller, more specialized vendors tend to be. The conversations we had were longer and more substantive than what any of us had expected going in.

We also spent a significant amount of time off the booth, walking the floor, sitting in sessions, and having the kind of informal conversations that only happen when 100,000 people in the same industry end up in the same building for a week. We talked to potential partners, did competitive research, and listened to what shop owners and ops managers were complaining about when no one was selling to them.

The complaints were familiar. Scheduling is still a mess. Inventory numbers are still wrong. People are still running critical operations in spreadsheets they do not trust. The software they bought is not used the way it was supposed to be used, the team that implemented it is gone, and no one fully understands the configuration.

None of that surprised us. But hearing it in person, from a hundred different people across six days, made the whole thing feel more concrete. Here is what else we took away.

Every Booth Had AI on It

Walk the floor at IMTS 2026 and you would think the machining industry had solved manufacturing. Every booth had an AI angle. Hardware vendors running CNC equipment were pitching AI. Tooling companies were pitching AI. Software vendors had rebuilt their entire messaging around it. The word was everywhere, in banners, in booth conversations, in the sessions, in the collateral stacked on every table.

Most attendees were not buying it.

The machinists and shop owners and ops managers walking that floor are sharp people. They have seen enough software demos to know the difference between a capability and a talking point. When a machine tool vendor explains that their equipment now has AI-driven optimization, the first question a plant manager asks is: what does it actually do, and what does it cost me to find out? The answers were rarely satisfying.

What we observed was a version of the same bait-and-switch that shows up in enterprise software all the time. Vendors paste a new word over existing functionality, reframe features they already had, and hope the buzzword does the selling for them. Some attendees were genuinely curious about where AI was heading in manufacturing. Most of them were tired of the headline before lunch on day one.

The shops that stood out in those conversations were the ones saying something specific. Not “we have AI” but “we built a tool that flags when your spindle load deviates from baseline across a production run, and here is what that caught at a customer site last quarter.” That lands. The rest is noise.

A Lot of Small Shops Came Just to See It

One of the things that surprised us was how many small shops were there as attendees, and how deliberate the trip was for them. For a lot of owners and managers running 20- to 50-person operations in the Midwest or Canada, IMTS is a bucket list item. They save for it, plan around it, and bring a couple of people with them. They are not window shopping. They are trying to figure out where to invest next.

Those conversations were the most honest ones we had all week. A shop owner from Ohio told us he had been running his scheduling on a whiteboard and two spreadsheets for eleven years and it was starting to break down as the business grew. He was not looking for a demo. He wanted to understand his options from someone who had actually been inside a shop like his. A plant manager from a mid-size machining operation in Michigan said his team had looked at three ERP software vendors in the past year and walked away from all of them because the demos never matched how his floor actually ran.

That gap, between what a vendor shows in a demo and what happens on a real shop floor, came up over and over again at IMTS. It is not a new problem, but it was clearly still the dominant frustration for people actively evaluating software.

The Demos Never Look Like the Shop Floor

Spend a few hours walking the software section of IMTS and you will see a lot of polished presentations running on clean data, with smooth workflows and perfect outputs. Everything resolves. Nothing is late. No one is chasing a part. The scheduling screen is tidy and the inventory numbers match.

That is not what a real shop looks like.

Real shops have hot jobs that blow up the schedule at 10am. They have material that is “somewhere in the building” but not where it needs to be. They have operators who stopped trusting the job traveler months ago and now just ask the supervisor what to run next. They have scrap that gets logged late, if at all, which means the root cause never gets fixed because no one even knows where to look.

The ERP software vendors that showed up at IMTS with polished demos built on clean data are not lying, exactly. But they are showing you the best case, and the best case is not what you are buying. You are buying software that has to survive a Thursday afternoon when a customer calls with an engineering change and your one planner is out sick.

We built OnRamp inside Mancor, a Tier 1 automotive fabricator running six facilities in Ontario. That is not a footnote in our story. It is the whole story. The problems we solved in OnRamp are problems we watched happen on a real floor, repeatedly, until we figured out how to handle them. When we show a demo, it is built around workflows that come from that experience, not from a product manager’s idea of what a shop floor might look like.

We heard from multiple people at IMTS that they had been through ERP software implementations that went sideways because the vendor’s team had never actually worked inside a plant. The software was technically functional but operationally useless because it was built around how someone thought manufacturing worked, not how it actually does.

What We Came Home With

We came home with leads worth following up on, a list of potential partners worth exploring, and a clearer sense of where the market is right now.

The machining industry is not short on technology options. It is short on technology that works the way the floor actually works. The AI wave is real, but most of the practical applications are still early, and the shops that are going to benefit most from them are the ones that have their core operations under control first. Scheduling, inventory, quality, maintenance, shipping: if those are still running on whiteboards and spreadsheets, adding an AI layer on top does not fix anything.

That is a conversation we are going to keep having, at shows and outside of them, because it is the honest version of what manufacturers need to hear right now.

If you were at IMTS and we did not get a chance to connect, or if you found us in the back corner and want to continue the conversation, reach out. We are easy to find.