Manufacturing the Future Tulip's Natan Linder on Why AI Is Everywhere and Nowhere
Meet Natan Linder, Co-founder & CEO of Tulip
Natan Linder, Co-founder & CEO of Tulip, brings a unique perspective to manufacturing technology, shaped by years spent working directly in production environments. As he explains, the genesis of Tulip came from observing a fundamental gap: "There's a missing piece of software platform in the stack that is designed for the people who actually do the work in operations." His career working on collaborative robotics, 3D printing, and embedded systems consistently brought him face-to-face with frontline workers who lacked the digital tools that office workers take for granted.
Manufacturing organizations struggle with rigid systems that cannot adapt quickly enough to changing business needs. Traditional enterprise software requires lengthy implementation cycles, detailed specifications, and often delivers solutions that are outdated by the time they go live. This inflexibility prevents manufacturers from achieving the continuous improvement and agility necessary to remain competitive in today's rapidly evolving markets. The lack of accessible tools for industrial engineers, quality experts, and process specialists means valuable domain expertise remains locked in spreadsheets and tribal knowledge rather than being captured in scalable digital workflows.
Tulip was founded in 2014 by engineers from MIT Media Lab, including Natan and his co-founder Roni Kubot. The company emerged from a simple but powerful insight: manufacturing needed a no-code, cloud-based platform that would allow frontline operations experts to create custom applications without requiring traditional software development. By giving industrial process engineers, quality teams, and operations managers the ability to digitize their workflows and capture data on their own terms, Tulip enables what Natan calls composable operations, where production systems can be built bottom-up by the people who understand the work best.
In This EpisodeNatan Linder discusses why he believes digital transformation is a meaningless term that should be replaced with continuous transformation. He explains how AI is finally becoming useful in operational environments when properly governed and integrated into platforms that understand manufacturing context. The conversation covers composability versus modularity, the importance of empowering frontline workers with first-class technology tools, and why manufacturing competitiveness depends on giving organizations the ability to iterate and improve rapidly rather than waiting months for new software features.
Topics- How spending years in production environments led to identifying the missing software layer designed specifically for frontline operations.
- Modular vs. composable systems and why composable operations enable organizations to adapt and evolve production systems.
- Why digital transformation is a meaningless buzzword and should be replaced with continuous transformation as an ongoing practice and mindset.
- How AI has been used in manufacturing for decades but generative AI requires proper governance and context to be useful.
- The critical importance of empowering frontline workers with the same quality of technology tools that knowledge workers have enjoyed.
- Focusing on solution-first thinking aligned with business goals rather than adopting technology just because others are doing it.
- How global supply chain reconfiguration is driven by geopolitical factors, customer proximity needs, and the desire for reduced dependencies on single sources.
- The role of no-code platforms in enabling industrial engineers and process experts to capture domain knowledge and create digital workflows independently.
- Augmented Ops, Natan’s podcast
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