Talk to a shop owner who has been buying machines for 20 years, and you'll hear the same thing. The sales representative used to stop by. The service technician used to sit in the break room for a minute. Somebody knew the floor, remembered the last retrofit, and asked about your son. That kind of relationship is how a shop ended up with four lathes instead of one, and how a warranty got stretched on a Friday night when a spindle went down.
These situations are harder to find now. Reps and techs are still the same people they were 20 years ago. Their week, though, has filled up with work that has nothing to do with the customer – for example, pulling territory lists, cross-checking old CRM entries, and chasing down which leads actually closed; or figuring out which control is on which machine, who bought what five years ago, and whether that part is under warranty. They ask around, wait for an email, and update a system built for accounting – not for their work. By the time they're ready to go see a customer, half the day is gone.
And there's nobody to pick up the slack. Twenty years ago, a builder could hire a third rep to split the territory or add another service tech to cover more of the state. That's not a luxury most companies have anymore. The people who are great at this job are difficult to find, expensive to train, and often approaching retirement. A lot of teams, often consisting of one rep and one tech, are doing the work that used to be done by three people, but in the same five-day work week.
Consider these challenges across a fiscal year; the shops feel it. Reps can't visit as many customers. Techs can't respond as fast. The smallest shops – the ones that don't place an order every quarter – fall off the calendar first. And those are exactly the shops that made American manufacturing what it is.
AI is starting to fix this, and it's less glamorous than it sounds. No robots, no predictive anything. Just software that absorbs the admin, so people don't have to.
Milltronics CNC Machines (IMTS booth #338319) – a longtime member of AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology that has been building toolroom and production machines in Minnesota since the early 1970s – uses AI to watch public signals like government contract awards, new facility announcements, and UCC filings and routes the relevant shops to the right distributor and rep. At ANCA (IMTS booth #237406), an Australian grinder builder, AI scores every shop in the territory for toolroom indicators so reps stop spending Monday morning guessing where to drive. At Knox Manufacturing Solutions – a Mazak distributor in Franklin, Ohio, that has built its name on service for nearly 30 years – AI handles the research, lookups, and system updates that were eating into shop-floor time.
The sales engineer who can read a shop floor in 30 seconds – or the service tech who knows which way a specific spindle likes to fail – does work AI can't do. What AI can do is carve out enough time for these individuals to perform these tasks more often, for more customers, including the smaller shops that used to get passed over.
IMTS 2026 will be a great place to understand the latest AI advancements. The conversations at distributor booths are already starting to sound different. For example, there are fewer pitches about new controls and more openings like, "We already know what you're running; here's what we'd do next." That's the version of the industry the old-timers would recognize – where the rep knew your shop, the tech picked up the phone, and a supplier earned its customers one breakroom conversation at a time.
Jannik Wiedenhaupt is cofounder and chief product officer at Supplyco AI, an AI operating system for manufacturers and distributors that makes sure their teams can focus on what matters.
