Russ Bukowski, CEO of Mastercam’s and the Bold Bet On AI and Acquisitions

We talk with Mastercam CEO Russ Bukowski about how AI, vertical integration are reshaping CAM. From voice‑enabled Copilot to reseller acquisitions under Sandvik, Russ lays out a roadmap for faster programming, safer code, and a tighter art‑to‑part thread.

• Modernizing Mastercam’s UX and onboarding the next generation
• Vertical integration of sales, service, and support to get closer to customers
• Sandvik acquisition and the digital thread from design to inspection
• Copilot as an action layer: voice commands, automation, and scripts
• Leveraging tooling data for safer feeds and speeds across materials
• Enabling one‑off and small‑batch work with generative programming
• Partner tools for faster quoting and job breakdowns
• Elevating experts while reducing time‑to‑competency for novices
• Competitive stance on AI leadership in CAM

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Roopinder 0:21

Hello and welcome to FoDES, the Future of Design and Engineering Software Podcast. My name is Roopinder Tara. On the show, we will have guests that will discuss tools and technology that engineers will find interesting and useful. Today's guest is Russ Bukowski. He's the CEO of Master cam. So why is he on the future of design and engineering software? Well, for one thing, CAM, computer aided manufacturing, is where design and engineering gets real. Up until then, it has only existed as images. Russ sees beyond the machine shop, beyond a fragmented CAM industry with small type companies whose only hope is to be acquired by CAD companies. Under Russ's direction and Sandvik's money, Mastercam has made a series of acquisitions of its own. It is growing. Russ, nice to meet you. Let me welcome you to the show. Thank you. Great to be here, and yeah, so nice to meet you as well. I've known about Mastercam for some time. My specialty is the design side of software, CAD. But of course I know about Mastercam, you've been long been a partner, great partner, gold partner of SolidWorks, correct? Yes. Yeah. And your history with the Mastercam goes back to 2010, correct?

Speaker 1 1:33

Yeah, I just crossed 15 years with Mastercam and uh took over the president role just about a year ago, December 13th

Russ’s Path: UX, Shops, And Software

Speaker 1 1:40

last year.

Roopinder 1:40

So you're presiding over a lot of changes or growth, acquisition, growth by acquisition, I would say. Yes.

Speaker 1 1:49

Yes. We're growing both organically and inorganically right now. We've got some exciting new product development, but nine acquisitions so far this year. We still got what about 25 days left in the year? So who knows? Might have time for one or two more.

Roopinder 2:01

Yeah. The night is still young. So very good. I was looking at your bio researching in preparation for our chat, and I noticed you went to Springfield Technical Community College. This is not the same Sprinfield as the Simpsons, correct? No. All right. So when I saw that Springfield Technical College, I thought you would be CAM there, but I'm sure they have CAM as an option, but you studied digital media. So tell me that. You studied what I'm doing, kind of.

Speaker 1 2:28

Yeah, I did. And they are a great Mastercam customer there as well. And they do teach Mastercam, a manufacturing facility, an all hosp shop there, which is a great facility. I actually went to a vocational high school and studied computer science for four years. I wanted to blend the computer science with a little bit more of the digital media side. I really focused on software design when I was in college. So I put together the two sides of the software experience, both the creating the software from the code standpoint, learning more about the users and how to design software for humans, and really built my career around that. I did a little bit of the TV radio work while I was there as well, but I really focused more on the digital media side. I focused much more on user experience and software design than I did on true digital media.

Roopinder 3:12

When was the first time you got your hands dirty with machine oil and had cut chips in your hair?

Speaker 1 3:18

17 years old, I was working in a machine shop. Started out sweeping the floors, as most people do. And before long, I was doing manual deburring and I worked my way up to doing the manual lathe work in the machine shop. That was really it was about a six-month run for me in a machine shop, and it was my only experience in the machine shop. The rest of my career has been focused much more on the digital side. But I worked for a large manufacturer for five years, and I was designing software for the manufacturing industry. This was 25 years ago and supporting a large multinational manufacturing facility from an IT standpoint. So I've never been far from a shop floor since I've been 17, basically.

Roopinder 4:00

Yeah, it seems like the ideal blend, but you got the software experience and you have all the machine shop experience. So yeah, you have a shop at home?

Speaker 1 4:07

I don't know. I'm fortunate that we have a nice shop at the Master cam headquarters down in Connecticut. Yeah, exactly. And they're smart enough to let me get close to the machines, but not actually operate the machines without supervision because I'm stronger on the design side really than I am on the CNC programming side, even though I understand it. I mean, when you get into the material science and all that, it's a whole different ball game. So usually I'm good at designing and coming up with ideas, and I go down and talk to our application specialists and say, okay, what did I do wrong for manufacturability here? And they usually help me figure out, oh, hey, we can't make this cut, we got to make this change. And so yeah, they're the pros.

Roopinder 4:44

So you probably can, should I say, throw your weight around a little bit because you're now president, but I remember getting kicked out of a lot of machine shops for exactly that sort of thing. It's like, you don't know what you're doing. You're just, I came out of school, an engineer, I knew everything, and I knew how part was supposed to be made, and I showed them the drawings, and boy, they called me in and read me the riot act there.

Speaker 1 5:05

So it's a great relationship I have with the team in our manufacturing lab. They do some really interesting projects and benchmarks of our software. So I poke my head in there any sh I get just to see what they've got going on. And sometimes they're even working on some really cool customer-facing parts,

Modernizing Mastercam’s User Experience

Speaker 1 5:20

helping customers figure out how to tackle really complex application-specific processes at Mastercam.

Roopinder 5:26

Okay. Tell me about your first job at Mastercam and how you rose up through the ranks there, right?

Speaker 1 5:31

Okay. Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, my backgrounds in computer science and software design, and I actually came in as the first user experience designer at Mastercam. I have been leading a couple of small teams at my previous organization, which was in the education space and really wanted to get into something more complex. I was familiar with Mastercam, even though I had never used it, because all my experience in design and the design engineering side had primarily been in rhinoceros 3D, learning that in college. I was familiar with the space, came into the company and saw all the opportunity with how complex the software is for taking that humanistic approach to designing the product. Really proud of the work that I did and the team that I worked with in my early days at Mastercam, because if you look back at the product when I started versus where the product was even five years ago or where it is today, we've come a long way. I mean, MasterCam is a long-standing product. It's been out in the market for over 40 years, and you tend to inherit some legacy design principles in your applications, just like we did in Mastercam. And so we spent a lot of time initially when I started at Mastercam. How can we modernize the solution and how can we bring it up to the industry standard? And really the key was how do we get more young people to adopt Mastercam as an application, right? And that was my big focus. And within the first couple of years, I had started a user experience team and took on a larger role managing different aspects of the product portfolio. Within my first five years at Master cam, I think I was managing four or five different teams, and it was all around the user-facing aspects of the product. So it was the user experience team, which managed the design and the research into the product, our localization team, which translates the product into 16 languages, our documentation team, which creates all the online help and assistance, our training team. And I had even started a video production team that now resides in marketing, but was creating a lot of technical content for our rollouts and things of that nature. So very quickly, they tapped into me to say, Hey, your skill set's broader than design. Can you help in these other areas? So really built up that part of the organization. And then about six years ago, our former president Megan West came to me and said, Hey, you got a really great mind for the strategy work. Would you be willing to help us on more of the business strategy side? I love the business strategy side as well. I consider it as a designer at heart. I'm still using all my design skills, just in a very different context, right? I'm designing a strategy. How do we move the business forward? So I came in and started working on the business strategy. In the time we were still an independent organization, they didn't have the tolerance or the willingness to really grow rapidly through acquisition. So a lot of the work I did initially was helping develop product roadmap, helping develop vision for the organization,

Sandvik Acquisition And Strategy Shift

Speaker 1 8:20

our corporate values and things of that nature, and getting us aligned there. And then when we were acquired by Sandvik in 2021, they came to us and said, What's your appetite for acquisition? And of course, I was hungry for acquisition. And I said, Yeah, waiting. You're probably waiting for it. So we came in with the wish list. We said, here's what we'd like to do. We'd like to vertically integrate Mastercam because when we were an independent organization when the company was started in the 80s, the founders took a very smart strategy, right? They de-risked the organization by partnering with independent organizations for the sales and the services and the supports of Mastercam. But as we grow and as we want to tackle larger competition in the market and go toe-to-toe with an Autodesk or a Siemens or a PTC, we felt it was the right time for us to vertically integrate our sales services and support. And really, that was the focus of what we started. We acquired a small company in Canada called Postability back in 2022 or no, 2023. They create post processors for Mastercam, which is the interface layer between our software and the CNC machine. And that was the start of the vertical integration journey. And then in 2024, we acquired our first reseller, which was East Coast US-based reseller, SimQuest. They were a good-sized organization. They had about 40, 45 employees, and we worked on integrating them in, but our hopes were much larger. SamVic came back to us and said, How do we do this? How do we do this faster? How do we accelerate this growth journey? And if you see the press releases from earlier, this eight acquisitions in the first quarter. So we developed a acquisition strategy and a playbook to go through these acquisitions very quickly. And that was seven resellers, all US-based resellers. And we acquired one small Danish technology company that had built a in-process probing solution for Mastercam, CIMCO Probing, it was at the time, now Mastercam Probing. So we acquired all that and then spent the majority of this year integrating those businesses to really strong success. And then we just picked up the acquisitions again last month with the acquisition of our St. Louis-based reseller, QTE. And so expect to see a couple more press releases in the next couple of months because our strategy is to vertically integrate. The purpose of it is we want to be closer to the customers. That's something that when I came in my first couple of days at Mastercam, I noticed that there was a disconnect because we worked largely through the reseller network. So we were getting feedback from resellers, but we weren't necessarily always connecting with the end users of the product or the end buyers of the product. Now, as a direct organization, we have a lot more access to those customers and we can get better quality feedback when we're developing new products and new experiences. And so that's the journey we're on right now

Vertical Integration And Reseller Rollups

Speaker 1 11:00

is that vertical integration journey. Primarily right now in North America, we have plans to expand that as time continues as well.

Roopinder 11:06

Here go international. Now, Sandvik is a giant Swedish company, correct? Multi-billion dollars, tens of billions of dollars in revenue. What was that like? Are you by any chance Swedish yourself? How's that culture problem problem or issue? Is it an issue? Yeah.

Speaker 1 11:22

Well, not Swedish, but having been to uh Stockholm and back several times, it's a great fit from a cultural standpoint. I was all for the acquisition when we did it at the time. I was a strong supporter of the decision, primarily because it was Sandvik, right? This was not another large tech company that was looking to just amalgamate all the solutions into a single stack. It also wasn't a venture capitalist firm that you worry about coming in and gutting to increase profitability to resell. Exactly. So this was a company, though, that on paper you look at them and you say, okay, well, you can see the connection. They make tools, they are used by CNC programmers, but most of their portfolio is made up by rock mining and rock processing. They really want to go big into the digital space around manufacturing. And, you know, for the last four, almost five years, they've stuck true to their word and the vision of what they want to do and really have a great roadmap of providing this seamless digital thread to customers, right? We call it at Master cam, we say art to part, right? Going from the drawing all the way to the finished part. And that's really what Sandvik is building. And Mastercam is obviously a core component in there. I'm really starting to see now we've got great point solutions inside of Sandvik, and we're trying to build the bridges between the point solutions to really provide that one-stop shop to manufacturers who need everything from design all the way through to inspection and quality analysis.

Roopinder 12:44

I take it Sandvik was a Mastercam user, or correct me if I'm wrong. Oh, by the way, I know of Sandvik from a long time ago because I had loved their woodworking tools. I've got their, I still have a scraper I have in the woodshop that's a Sandvik, and it's it really works. Yeah, it's good company from my point of view.

Speaker 1 13:01

Glad to hear that. Yeah. So Sandvik Coramant, which is their tooling division, and they have several businesses under the tooling division. They were always working with us prior to the acquisition to integrate their tool data. We'll talk a little bit about copilot here, but that's one of the big things on the horizon for us. We haven't fully implemented it yet, but we're working on getting that technical like feed and speed data into the copilot so we can make smart recommendations to users. And that's where you start to see. Now people say, oh, now we see why a tooling company would buy a software company. You can start to see the synergies when you put that data together, right? Because now we can provide not just the software to program the tooling recommendations with direct access to purchase those tools and make that process seamless for the customers as well.

Roopinder 13:45

Yeah, makes sense. And I'm hearing that quite a bit from industrial manufacturing giants that Siemens has said this and NVIDIA has said this too, that they're not hardware companies, they're software companies. And at least that's the direction they want to be going into, right? The hardware is like this is that could give them a great advantage. And if they jump on AI, which I'm glad you steered me back towards co-pilot, because I really do want to talk about AI. AI is like a cent should be a central theme of every tech discussion. And uh so so tell me about tell me a little bit about that. What is what is co-pilot and what distinguishes copilots from other co-pilots? Because that that is kind of a buzzword now already. Copilot is you know, everybody has one.

Speaker 1 14:27

Certainly, everybody has a copilot or a chat GPT or their version of it. Mastercam, we released Mastercam Copilot back in July with the release of our latest software, Mastercam 2020. And we've been improving it steadily since. And it's an online service that inside of Mastercam, you can ask it questions about how to do something specific in the software. And I think that's where everybody tends to start because a lot of companies have these large data banks of existing documentation and processes and things like that. So you say, let's put that into a large language model that somebody can query and get some answers back. That that's the low-hanging fruit when it comes to copilots these days. And a lot of people are doing that. But we took it a step further and we actually implemented the ability to drive the software through our copilot as well. So you can give commands to to Master cam Copilot, even if you don't know the actual name, you know, the very specific name of it. Instead of saying, you know, go to wireframe view, you can ask Mastercam, you know, hey Mastercam, can you put the put it in wire view or wire mode?

Building The Digital Thread: Art To Part

Speaker 1 15:30

And it will interpret what you want. And 98% of the time, it will get you exactly what you want, even if you don't know the exact right answer for it. And when I say, hey, Mastercam, you can actually talk to our copilot as well. So we have voice enabled. So you can give it commands and it will execute your commands pretty quickly by interpreting what you say, which is the software engineering team has shown some really great progress on some internal development, which allows us to use copilot to automate and create reusable scripts. If you're in a manufacturing environment and you have a process, let's say you need to punch a bunch of quarter, 20 holes in a base plate and you do that over and over again on almost every job as part of your work holding, that can become very repetitive, very tedious. So we're working on the ability for our copilot to actually generate reusable scripts that people can then just play back and run anytime they need to do that particular thing. And you don't even need to have any coding experience to be able to do this. Copilot will actually write the code in the background to automate that for the users. That's a feature that we haven't released to the public yet, but that's where we're going with this, is the whole point of what we're trying to do with Mastercam is make manufacturing faster, easier, and more accessible for people. If we can include more knowledge in our data bank, and like I mentioned, the data from the Sandvik tooling brands, you know, there's an opportunity for us to help close that knowledge gap inside of manufacturing using these AIs, because now I don't need to know what the proper feeds and speeds are for 6061 aluminum. I can ask the software, it's like, hey, I'm gonna cut 6061 aluminum. I'm using these tools, this coolant. What's the appropriate feed and speed or what's the safety? And of course, 6061 aluminum is probably not where people are most concerned. It comes when they're using the super alloys in the more expensive materials, Invar, IncNel, things like that, where they say, okay, I want to make sure I've got some trusted data before I go and run that NC code on a $20,000 block of stock, right? You don't want to be the guy who scraps that on the shop floor. So we're working on improving co-pilot. So it really becomes not just an assistant that guides you through the software, but an assistant that guides you through the manufacturing process. And that's the vision for where we're going with our copilot.

Roopinder 17:40

I totally get it. And this is very, I think you have put CAM in the lead in this regard. I've seen it done, like I said, with Siemens Software Division, can rely on this on all the tribal industry knowledge and the manufacturing knowledge that the big Siemens has. You guys can now do it with all the knowledge that Sandvik has. There's no other CAM company that has that advantage, that sort of help. They'd have to resort to their own customers, which are, I would, most of them are much smaller than Sandvik, that's for sure.

Speaker 1 18:10

Customers are uh stingy with who they give their data to anyway, right? So it's a conundrum for them. And also one of the great benefits of having our own manufacturing facility on site is that

Copilot Basics: Help, Voice, And Commands

Speaker 1 18:20

we can test and prove out all this technology as well. And to the best of my knowledge, Mastercam is leading the industry in the CAD Cam space for integrating AI into the manufacturing space. And again, we just know how important it is. I tell people whenever I go and visit a customer, I always look at the Mastercam user's desk and I always look for a copy of the machinery's handbook. If somebody has the machinery's handbook, they tend to have that deep knowledge around the manufacturing principles or at least know how to find the information, how to ask the questions to get the right information for feeds and speeds. But I'm noticing a lot of the next generation of customers coming out are not coming out with that same.

Roopinder 18:58

They're asking ChatGPT or but they're using AI to get that. And it makes total sense, doesn't it? Like, why should I trust my memory, which is, I gotta say, not what it used to be, maybe it was never good, but why should I have to remember that when Chat GPT has read everything and remembers everything, right? And this is just for hello. I'm saying why why can't I use that as a resource? And it just boggles my mind that not everybody's doing that. By the way, I have to give you credit for jumping ahead because every company I see as yes, it has trained itself on its own documentation, but going through the extra step of having it actually issue commands to the software, and what so I don't have to know not just speeds and feeds, but I don't have to remember the Mastercam commands, perhaps one day that I can just say, hey, create the G code for this sequence for this part, and it'll understand my natural language and issue the commands that I need. If it can do it for Master cam, why couldn't something like that do it for any CAM software, right? Or any design software, right? All you have to do is learn the commands. I'm making it sound easy, but all you have to do is learn the commands of the language. And all CAD/CAM and CAE languages are not like English, which we've all mastered, right? Which is 100,000 words. It should be easy.

Speaker 1 20:15

Yeah. And to that point, like I said earlier, because we're parsing the natural language, you don't even need to know the exact right command. And my dream in the manufacturing space, and really this is something I've been pushing since the day I started working at Mastercam, manufacturing is quickly becoming a means to an end for our end users, right? They want to get jobs done faster because at the end of the day, they want to bring ideas to life. And that's what we really want to encourage people to do using Mastercam. We're always going to have experts who have the deep expertise that know how to navigate every single checkbox and option inside the software. And we want to continue to work with those customers. But for the people the next generation coming into manufacturing, they don't want to be experts in the software. They want to make their ideas come to life, right? And so how do we enable that? And that's really what we've been focusing on on the journey with our co-pilot. And again, what I've seen internally from our RD team on where they're going next with Copilot, I was impressed because they gave a demo. It was a very rudimentary demo, but they basically were able to talk to our co-pilot and start from a blank screen and design something and program it and output the NC code all through the co-pilot. We're not ready to release it to the public, but I see it as a very promising next step for where we go in incorporating these AI capabilities into the CAD/CAM space. I think what we're working on in the next six to 12 months is really going to be revolutionary as far as bringing AI into the CAD/CAM world.

Roopinder 21:41

You can see where this is going though, right? That if this is, let's say I don't need to know Mastercam real well, because I've been to a lot of trade shows, I've been to IMTS, and all the time I get a feeling that people, including people at the Mastercam booth, are very proud of Cam software. They have their leather aprons on and they're like usually old guys, tons

Automating Workflows And Script Generation

Roopinder 22:00

of shop experience, and they're happy to be masters of Mastercam, right? But you are saying is it there comes a time where I don't really have to learn Mastercam. I could push a button on my computer that says make this part, and I don't have to know a thingCAMCCcc= about the cam software.

Speaker 1 22:17

In some regard, yes, but you know, I kind of see it like the woodworking industry. And you think about the woodworking industry, there are a lot of people, and my grandfather was a Finnish carpenter as a professional, and he took a lot of pride in doing things by hand. And you can also do a lot of those things with the CNC router these days, right? There's the people who want to get just a little bit more performance out of the machine, right? If you think about a large manufacturing facility who's running the same part for six to 12 months on end as part of an assembly line, they need those people that know the software inside and out because AI is going to get the job done for you. It's going to get the job done for you, but it's likely not going to be as fast and as efficient as somebody who really truly understands how to make the software do exactly what they want in their production facility. Because that's the other end of it. If you take the CNC mean away, what is CAM software? It's a video game, right? And so you've got to always remember that on the other side of the CAM software is a very usually a very expensive CNC machine. And so while copilots are going to provide you with safe code to run on those machines, it may not always be the most efficient. And that's where you get your fine crafts people. And that's where I see we're going to, we're going to do two things to our end customers with things like Copilot. We're actually going to elevate the value of our existing expert users and Mastercam because they're going to be able to focus on how do I take this job the last mile and really drive the performance and the efficiency on the machine? How do I get better finishing directly off the machine so there's less handwork? Or they're going to focus on the things that AI is not ready necessarily to tackle just yet, like really complex multi-axis parts on like a head machine or something like that. That's something that you're still going to need an expert for some years to come on that. So that's one end. But then on the other end, it's going to pull so many more beginners and novices into the industry to enable them to jump further in their career than if they had to learn all these things manually. So now they can learn from the expertise that is in the industry while they remain in the industry, right? That's the big fear is I've heard it called the gray wave, right? Like, okay, we're going to see this mass retirement of manufacturing experts. And everybody's worried that we won't be able to get that knowledge transferred to people in time. And I see AI as an enabler to helping people become helping them learn Master cam more quickly so then they can adopt and learn that knowledge from the experts that we have out in the field.

Roopinder 24:42

That's a worthy goal. I've seen that gray wave exiting, and there's been some pushes to try to get the younger generation into the machine shop. And this is a great way to do that. Maybe you don't have to get your hands quite as dirty, and there is a tech component. You don't have to do the apprenticeship 25 years. You can get there faster. I think it has some great optimization potential for software that it can make a sequence optimized. You can make this faster. But I can see a great use of this of the co-pilot in just like one-off machining or small batch machining, right? Where you might be loath to CNC it. You might be loath to do something on a furniture manufacturer because you're not making 10,000 sofas or couches or whatever, or tables. You're making some for a special customer, customize, and it's small, it's tiny, but you wouldn't do that ordinarily. But if you have AI to help you, that'd be great. You could do much better with a

Tool Data, Feeds And Speeds, And Risk

Roopinder 25:40

custom semi-customer custom. You can use your CNC for that. It's never people never could do that. You could never use a CNC for Yeah.

Speaker 1 25:49

And when I talk to customers, one of the big challenges they have is they're getting too many orders from customers and they don't have the time to quote all these jobs. Um and this is where Mastercam has partnered with some really great companies like Upt Up to Parts, CloudNC. And a lot of these companies are working on solving those exact problems, right? The auto quoting process. And when we talk to customers, they say, oh, well, we don't have a solution, but one of our partners does. I show them these solutions, they go, Oh, this is brilliant. This is going to save me so much time because they're like, well, when in my day can I sit down and spend an hour or two just you know figuring out the quote for the customer? But now you can take your solid part file, you can import it into these solutions, and within minutes, it's recommending. Not only is it recommending what to charge the customer, but it's actually breaking down the setups that you're gonna need to go through and each individual charge that goes along with that. We're really excited about AI in general and manufacturing. And we're doing what we can on the CAD cam side, but I see some great partners enabling in other areas like quoting, job management. There's so many different aspects.

Roopinder 26:55

If you can handle more quotes, you can get more business, even if it's totally in totality, it might be greater, but the owners might be for smaller quantities, just because you have that AI assistance.

Speaker 1 27:07

Yeah, and I joked with one of the customers recently and I said, My job is to not make people the bottleneck, it's to make your machining capabilities the bottleneck. If I can get your machines running 24 hours a day for you, right, now you've got a different problem and and theoretically an easier problem to solve. That's a great problem if you say, I need seven more C N C machines to expand my capabilities, because the C and C machines generally, there's more access to acquiring CNC machines than there are to find the qualified people to program them. It really is changing the industry about how people look at this.

Roopinder 27:38

It seems like you're taking the lead in this. What have you determined from your as you look around to your competition? Do you feel like you're in the lead as well?

Speaker 1 27:46

From an AI standpoint, absolutely. Absolutely. Not only are we leading in the industry, but we're leading within Sandvik and we're working with some of the other business units on their point solutions to really come up with a holistic AI approach where, you know, even if you're in Mastercam, you can ask the AI, it might recommend solutions from other products to make people's lives. We're looking at how do we expand this so it's not just a CAD cam focus, but it's a holistic manufacturing AI that helps people from art to part. And one area that we talk about design engineering, we've already seen generative design out there for years, if not decades, at this point, right? Essentially generative programming, exactly what you mentioned, being able to do these custom one-off jobs much faster. And yeah, maybe it's not going to be as efficient as somebody programmed it by hand, but if it gets the job done and it gets it out the door, whereas you would never have even accepted that quote in the past, that's a huge advantage for manufacturers.

Roopinder 28:37

Oh, totally. I can totally see that. This is just amazing where this is heading. And at first I thought when I saw the acquisitions, I thought, oh, that's just Mastercam buying all its resellers just to improve the business. Because anytime you take over a reseller, you get what they make and you get their cut, right? And so that's happening in other industries, CAM, CAD, and CAM. But this is greater than that. You wouldn't want to buy your competitors to increase

Raising Experts While Onboarding Novices

Roopinder 29:00

the business because they're not going as fast as you are in a lot of this AI, right? And you could really race ahead with this.

Speaker 1 29:07

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And again, as I mentioned earlier, our acquisition strategy, sure, from a business standpoint, it's a great way to grow on the top line, but it's bigger than that. It's giving us access to more customers, it's allowing us to accelerate this AI manufacturing. And now we've got a sales force that can bring this direct to customers and demonstrate it without barriers. And then we can get that feedback directly from the customers. So yeah, it is a much larger strategic play for us than just the top line sales numbers.

Roopinder 29:34

Yeah, no, this is quite eye-opening because for the longest time, especially after Autodesk bought all these, they bought all the Delcam. And I thought, oh, this is the way it's heading. It's going to be CAD companies buying CAM companies. Because I never saw much movement or ambition from CAM companies. They were always like, oh, we're fine, we're doing good. We've got our slice of the business. But it was the CAD. So I thought, oh, everybody's going to become a CAD company. And that's but Siemens did that sort of. And now I could see like you guys, Master cam, to taking a lead, right? This is not, don't leave it up to the CAD companies. We know how to make the products, right? Just we're just going to be able to help people make it better, easier, or handle more operations. And yeah, this is this is encouraging. I'm very glad to hear the direction you're going in. Companies to use AI in a useful way, especially to handle the commands in their own software, because I find all software, not just CAM, but CAD and CAU enormously difficult to use. So this is great that you're heading that way. So genius. And I I don't just say genius to people who agree with me. You're actually making really good headway here. So good luck to you. There may be still be factions in with the leather aprons that say, what's this whiz kid up to here? Words to that effect. You have to power through that and go to the future. So good luck to you. Anything else to say before I leave you?

Speaker 1 30:55

No, I I appreciate being here. Mastercam, a journey to revolutionize. And you're absolutely right. We're not going to leave it up to the CAD companies. We're going to take the bull by the horns and we're going to own our own future here at Master cam.

Roopinder 31:06

Good. All right. Can we talk again? I hope you have taught those CAD companies a lesson. All right, Russ. Great to meet you. Pleasure. Thank you so much, Repinder.

Speaker 1 31:14

It was great meeting you as well.

Roopinder 31:16

Thank you for listening to FoDES, the Future of Design and Engineering Software Show, brought to you by ENGtechnica. I hope you have learned of a new application or technology that will help you with your job. If you have an application you think would be of interest to other engineers, please let me know by emailing me at roopinder at engtechnica.com or message me on LinkedIn.