For readers unfamiliar with the company, could you start by introducing Fictiv and how it came to be?
I’m Dave Evans, CEO and co-founder of Fictiv. I’m a mechanical engineer—mechanical and electrical—educated at Stanford and started my career at Ford. There, I worked on infotainment systems when iPhones and iPads were first emerging. The challenge was that cars took four to six years to develop, while consumer electronics had nine-month cycles. The question became: how can we shorten vehicle development to integrate fast-evolving technology as late as possible?
That challenge became the foundation for Fictiv, which I co-founded in 2013 to help teams design and build physical products faster and better. The company’s first phase focused on engineering speed. Around 2019–2020, we entered our second phase—globalisation—helping companies move from design to worldwide production. The pandemic made that mission critical, exposing weaknesses in traditional supply chains. Over the past two years, with the rise of generative AI, we’ve entered a third phase—using AI to transform sourcing and production workflows for the world’s most innovative products, from humanoid robots to satellites and surgical systems.
Why do you believe generative AI will be so transformative for manufacturing and supply chains?
When building physical products—robots, fusion reactors, satellites—two critical flows define success: the flow of information and the flow of material. The information flow covers how requirements and data are shared across systems; the material flow involves how physical goods move from factory to market. Shockingly, both are still managed with 40-year-old tools—spreadsheets, SharePoint folders, and outdated ERPs.
We’re using AI to manage these flows in real time. For instance, AI can analyse tariff changes, materials pricing, or rare-earth metal costs and instantly adapt sourcing plans. It can also assess where to build—Mexico, China, India, or the U.S.—based on cost, risk, or policy shifts. By controlling these two flows through AI, we’re helping companies modernise an industry that has long relied on archaic methods.
You recently integrated Misumi’s global logistics with your AI-driven platform. How is that improving the customer experience?
Before the acquisition, many customers were sourcing both custom and standard components separately—custom parts from Fictiv and standard parts like bearings and screws from Misumi. Misumi, a 70-year-old Japanese manufacturer with around 12,000 employees and billions in annual revenue, was a natural fit. Customers wanted one seamless experience for both.
This merger lets engineers order everything—custom or standard—from one global platform. It brings Japanese precision and quality standards together with our AI-driven flexibility. Now, customers can prototype and scale products faster, from humanoids to robotic surgery systems, under one unified supply and production ecosystem.
Your annual State of Manufacturing Report is highly regarded. What insights are shaping your priorities for the coming year?
This will be our 11th annual State of Manufacturing report, and some themes remain consistent. Companies are urgently seeking to diversify production geographies and reshore to the U.S., given geopolitical tensions and tariff risks.
AI adoption is at record highs, but most executives still struggle to understand where and how to implement it effectively.
Labour shortages in the U.S. remain a major challenge for scaling manufacturing, and supply chain constraints continue to be the biggest blocker to innovation. Many assume engineering is the bottleneck, but it’s actually the supply chain—how to source, scale, and manage risk. Those findings are driving our product development: tools that simplify sourcing decisions and bring supply-chain resilience into early design phases.
How do you view the growing supply chain risks caused by geopolitics, tariffs, and natural disruptions?
The turning point was 2020. Supply chain risk moved from being a back-office concern to a C-suite and even board-level issue. Consumers felt it directly when they couldn’t get basic goods like toilet paper or bicycles. What used to be internal operational talk became front-page news.
Since Trump’s 2018 tariffs, followed by the Biden administration maintaining many of those measures, plus the pandemic, canal blockages, and extreme weather events, companies now accept that disruption isn’t an “if” but a “when.” The shift today is from reactive crisis management to proactive scenario planning. Using AI, we simulate potential disruptions—tariff spikes, factory shutdowns, or natural disasters—and instantly model alternative sourcing or reshoring strategies. This “when, not if” mentality defines today’s resilient supply chain leaders.
Let’s return to AI. How is it practically changing the design-to-production workflow?
Since Fictiv’s founding, AI has been part of our DNA, but the leap has come with generative AI and large language models. They’ve enabled something new: instantaneous decision-making. Disparate systems that once required manual integration can now be coalesced by AI to make better, faster, data-driven choices.
One of our AI tools, Materials.AI, replaces decades of tacit expertise once held by veteran engineers. It helps designers instantly determine which resin or metal to use for a given prototype or production part. Another tool automates global scheduling—analysing capacity, quality scores, and pricing across factories in the U.S., India, China, and Mexico to find the optimal fit. What once required spreadsheets and phone calls now happens autonomously. The result: dramatically faster workflows, higher quality, and reduced cost.
For companies not yet using AI, what risks do they face?
The pace of change is accelerating. Companies that don’t adopt AI-driven analysis and scheduling will find themselves unable to compete on speed or efficiency. Manufacturing is entering a new era where intelligent automation is no longer optional—it’s foundational.
Those that continue to rely on manual systems will struggle with delays, cost overruns, and lost competitiveness. AI is not just a productivity enhancer; it’s becoming the operating system for the entire supply chain.
How do you envision the future of manufacturing and Fictiv’s role in it?
We believe all humans are creative, and our mission is to unlock that creativity by removing barriers to physical innovation. In software, tools like AWS democratised creation—anyone could build an app. Physical products haven’t reached that level of accessibility yet. Our job is to make manufacturing as easy and scalable as building software.
Over the next decade, we’ll continue to simplify sourcing and accelerate innovation across industries. We take pride in seeing our customers launch satellites, perform robotic surgeries, and develop fusion reactors that were once confined to labs. Fictiv exists to power that transformation—to help humanity imagine, design, and manufacture the products of tomorrow.
