Three months into the agentic AI shift, manufacturing finds itself at the same inflection point a generation of CEOs faced at the dawn of digital: lean in now, or wait for someone else to prove it works. The cost of waiting just got steeper.

Enno de Boer, Senior Partner at McKinsey and co-founder of the World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Network, returns to Augmented Ops to talk with Natan Linder, Tulip's co-founder and CEO, about why this is not the next wave of IoT, 3D printing, or even mobile. Enno argues AI is a general purpose technology on the order of electricity, the first one in roughly a century, and that most industrial organizations are still treating it like a tool layered on top of yesterday's workflows.

The result, he says, is Amdahl's Law in action: speed up one element by 20%, leave the system intact, and you get zero results. That, in his read, is why 2025 returned almost no measurable AI impact in industry, and why the new normal of a major supply-chain disruption every single year demands more than another wave of pilots and chat interfaces. The real work is to rebuild the operating system underneath, the AI system, the data system, and a new division of labor between humans and agents.

The conversation gets specific. Enno walks through John Deere's agentic material-availability and replanning system, a top-five electronics supply chain that hit a billion dollars of impact by collapsing planning cycles tenfold, and a coding-agent deployment in financial services where a night shift of agents drove 200x throughput while humans handled validation by day. He is blunt about what has decayed since the Toyota Production System era, why the 80/20 inversion of direct-to-indirect labor in modern factories has gone out of check, and why the future is distributed, hyper-local, and personalized down to an "order of one." McKinsey's Rewired playbook anchors the strategy lens: identify the two or three economic leverage points that drive 70% of the value, then build the systems to go after them.

For operations leaders, his ask is a single metric to optimize against: clock speed. Enno's ambition for the next decade is a 100x increase in manufacturing clock speed, and he is direct about what it will take to get there.

Models think. Systems act. Manufacturing's job, starting now, is to build the systems.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/KYGu7oOMh2A

Augmented Ops is a podcast for industrial leaders, citizen developers, shop floor operators, and anyone who cares about what the future of frontline operations will look like across industries. This show is presented by Tulip, the Frontline Operations Platform. You can find more from us at Tulip.co/podcast or by following the show on LinkedIn.

Special Guest: Enno de Boer.

Geopolitical pressure is reshaping how the US buys and builds for defense. Nick Sinai of Insight Partners breaks down the shift from cost-plus to commercial procurement, the rise of venture-backed defense tech, and how to move fast without losing safety.

In this episode of Augmented Ops, host Erik Mirandette, Tulip's Chief Business Officer, is joined by Nick Sinai, Managing Director at Insight Partners and co-author of Hack Your Bureaucracy. Before Insight, Nick spent nearly six years inside the Obama administration as US Deputy CTO, where he led the Open Data Initiative and helped stand up the Presidential Innovation Fellows program.

Nick breaks down what's actually changing in defense procurement under the second Trump administration, the rise of venture-backed defense tech now drawing tens of billions of dollars a year, and the shift from cost-plus to commercial-products buying. He explains why the traditional 15-year acquisition cycle no longer matches the pace of technology, and how companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and Palantir are reshaping what it means to be a defense prime.

The conversation also explores the tradeoff every modern supplier into defense has to navigate: how to move faster on cost and speed without junking the safety and compliance requirements that exist for good reason. Nick offers a grounded view from someone who's lived inside both the bureaucracy and the venture world, including what it actually takes for reform to stick across administrations.

The headlines are full of speeches about speed. Nick lays out what's genuinely different this time, what's likely to regress to the mean, and where operations leaders supplying into the defense base should be paying attention.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Qu7bCfNpraA

Augmented Ops is a podcast for industrial leaders, citizen developers, shop floor operators, and anyone who cares about what the future of frontline operations will look like across industries. This show is presented by Tulip, the Frontline Operations Platform. You can find more from us at Tulip.co/podcast or by following the show on LinkedIn.

Special Guest: Nick Sinai.