Augmented Ops is a podcast for industrial leaders, innovators, and operators shaping the future of frontline operations.
In the first episode of Season 6, Tulip’s CEO Natan Linder and CMO Madilynn Castillo reflect on Operations Calling 2025 — a two-day gathering that brought more than 750 leaders, engineers, and builders to Tulip’s headquarters in Somerville, Massachusetts. The event marked a milestone for the manufacturing community and, in many ways, the beginning of a new chapter for Tulip.
The conversation isn’t about stages or schedules; it’s about what the event revealed. AI is becoming inseparable from operations, composability has moved from philosophy to practice, and a genuine sense of community is shaping how the industry learns and innovates.
Operations Calling 2025 was Tulip’s largest and most energized event to date. The atmosphere—with attendees filling every session, hallway, and demo area—reflected a collective sense of momentum. Manufacturers from across sectors, including Stanley Black & Decker, AstraZeneca, and AWS, shared how they are applying AI and composable systems to real problems on the shop floor.
Linder and Castillo describe the event as both a celebration and a reality check. Manufacturers are no longer talking about transformation as something to plan for; they’re doing it. Tulip’s role, they agreed, is to help teams make that transformation sustainable.
The story isn’t ‘AI instead of people.’ It’s ‘AI with people,’ applied where work actually happens.
That principle ran through nearly every session. From predictive quality to AI-assisted shift summaries, the conversation has shifted from what’s possible to what’s working.
The theme of AI for operations anchored much of the discussion. Linder emphasized that the hype surrounding AI often overshadows its most valuable dimension—when it’s embedded in daily work. AI, in Tulip’s view, isn’t a bolt-on feature; it’s an enabler of better collaboration, faster insight, and continuous learning.
Madilynn Castillo reflected on how this came to life across the event. The AI Passport Experience gave attendees hands-on exposure to Tulip’s AI tools, allowing them to translate documents, analyze process data, and explore agent-driven workflows. More than 140 participants earned AI Passport certifications after completing a guided, six-step journey that demonstrated how AI fits safely and effectively into operations.
These weren’t theoretical exercises. Each station represented an applied use case—AI as a translator, an analyzer, a quality checker. The takeaway was simple: AI in manufacturing isn’t about automation replacing human effort; it’s about amplifying it through context and precision.
Transformation isn’t a finish line; it’s a reflex you build into how you run operations.
If the event’s focus on AI represented the tools of progress, its deeper message was about how progress happens. Linder and Castillo underscored that “digital transformation” has become an outdated phrase. Manufacturers who succeed today aren’t completing projects; they’re cultivating a rhythm of continuous improvement.
This concept of continuous transformation—small, rapid cycles of change that compound over time—appeared in nearly every keynote and workshop. Companies like Stanley Black & Decker and Jazz Pharmaceuticals shared how they’ve turned experimentation into standard work, scaling what succeeds and learning quickly from what doesn’t.
Tulip’s approach mirrors that mindset. Composability gives teams the flexibility to evolve their systems incrementally, not by tearing out what exists but by layering, connecting, and improving. Linder pointed to this shift as a defining trait of modern manufacturing: adaptability is now as critical as efficiency.
The Agent Builders Challenge captured that spirit perfectly. Ahead of the event, top builders from Tulip’s customer community gathered to prototype AI-powered assistants using Tulip’s soon-to-be-announced composable agents. Their challenge was to design agents that solve real production problems. The prototypes were unveiled in a live workshop on day two, demonstrating not just technical skill but creativity and collaboration in action.
The challenge showed how far Tulip’s builder community has come. AI wasn’t presented as magic but as a tool to be shaped by the people closest to the work.
Throughout their conversation, Linder and Castillo returned to a term that has become almost synonymous with Tulip’s philosophy: composability. It’s a principle that’s now being echoed across the industry—a shared understanding that systems must evolve alongside the teams who use them.
At Operations Calling, composability wasn’t discussed as an abstract idea; it was visible. From customer sessions on modular architectures to partner exhibits showing plug-and-play integrations, the ecosystem itself illustrated how software, hardware, and human expertise can be composed into new forms of value.
The panel featuring leaders from NVIDIA, AWS, and DeepHow captured this perfectly: AI’s future in manufacturing depends on openness. No single company can solve for every workflow or context. Real innovation, they agreed, happens at the intersections where tools, data, and people connect.
That philosophy defines Tulip’s role in the broader ecosystem—not to own it but to enable it.
Even amid all the technical innovation, both Linder and Castillo emphasized that the human dimension remains at the center. Operations Calling wasn’t just an event name. It captured something real: the shared motivation to make work better, one improvement at a time.
The two-day event made that visible. Workshops filled with engineers trading ideas, live demos run by customers themselves, and hallway conversations where teams shared code snippets and app templates. The sense of collaboration extended well beyond Tulip’s platform.
Madilynn described it as a community in motion—proof that the future of manufacturing belongs to people who see technology not as control but as collaboration.
That balance between velocity and governance, ambition and accountability, is what gives the community its strength. The event’s success, they agreed, was measured not in attendance numbers but in the exchange of ideas and the confidence teams brought home.
The reflections in this first episode of Season 6 point to a manufacturing landscape that’s changing in rhythm, not direction. Continuous transformation has become the default mode, and AI has moved from hype cycle to habit.
The next horizon, Linder and Castillo suggest, will be about scale—expanding what works without losing the flexibility that made it successful in the first place. Governance, data discipline, and human-centered design will define the difference between experimentation and enterprise impact.
If Operations Calling 2025 was a snapshot of the present, it also offered a preview of the future: factories that learn, systems that adapt, and teams that lead with curiosity and creativity.
🎧 Explore more conversations with industry leaders at AugmentedOps.com — subscribe for future episodes and catch up on past seasons.
🎥 Watch Operations Calling 2025 presentations on demand.
