My first time at XYLEXPO
I’ve heard plenty of good things about European woodworking machinery over the years, and many of our US clients travel to the EU specifically to find new equipment. So when XYLEXPO came around, I decided it was time to see it for myself.
It is hard to overstate how much of the serious manufacturing hardware comes from Europe, especially Germany and Italy. Germany brings brands like Homag, Weinig, and Festool that everyone in the industry knows by name. Italy has Biesse and SCM Group, which dominate in CNC routers and full production lines. If you work in millwork or joinery and want to see where the industry is heading, this is the place to be.
Seeing these massive machines run live, instead of just reading about them, is a completely different experience. Out of everything there, the SCM Group booth was the one that really stuck with me.
I also discovered a new exhibition I hadn’t heard of before: Intermob Istanbul, a furniture and wood tech fair in Turkey happening this September. Perhaps someone from our team will make the trip there.
The legacy desktop software challenge
One thing that surprised me at XYLEXPO was how much of the software around these machines still lives on desktop. Part of that is fair — machine control has to run locally. No shop floor should stop cutting because the internet dropped.
But the business software around the machines is a different story. Estimating, quoting, project data, reporting: a lot of it is still locked inside desktop apps on legacy Windows machines. That’s the part that blocks everything modern — no AI on top, no integrations, no access from outside the office.
We’ve helped clients through this exact transition, rebuilding a legacy on-prem system in the cloud for one, and turning a desktop-era estimating workflow into a cloud web app for a US casework manufacturer. The mistake is treating it as one big rewrite. Staged, each step ships something the team uses right away, the old system keeps running underneath, and payback starts well before the migration is done.
Wood Industry 40 Under 40
I’ll admit I had to read the email twice — I’ve been named one of this year’s Wood Industry 40 Under 40. A huge thank you to Curtis Garrard for the nomination.
For a bit of context, the Wood Industry 40 Under 40 is an annual award by the Woodworking Network. It honours young professionals in North American wood products manufacturing who are making a real impact on their teams, their communities, and the industry as a whole. This year marks its 11th anniversary.
See you in Atlanta at the International Woodworking Fair, where I look forward to meeting the other nominees.
New client: a leading multi-family flooring contractor
I am thrilled to welcome a new client: a leading US multi-family flooring contractor. I wish I could tell you more, but we appreciate our client’s confidentiality.
Nonetheless, it has been fascinating learning how their team operates. They specialise in make-ready flooring for multi-family housing, which means they handle the fast turnaround required to prepare an apartment between tenants. When someone moves out, the unit needs to be ready for the next resident immediately.
We are currently running a PoC to see how AI and machine learning can speed up flooring quotes directly from floor plans. It is a task that made our AI engineers’ eyes light up, because it’s a bit of a challenge. In this sector, professional architectural drawings are often missing entirely, so we are training the system to work with the marketing floor plans found on apartment listing sites — often 3D renderings with no visible measurements.
I will keep you posted on our progress with this one.
Meanwhile, in real life
I took my first actual days off this year. It is funny how AI was supposed to take everyone’s jobs, yet my workload has only multiplied.
I started the trip in Switzerland, and a few days of quiet in the mountains turned out to be the perfect reset. Stepping away into that calm helps you see the big picture instead of just the immediate tasks. While there, I also held a few productive meetings with partners before heading into the energy of Milan for XYLEXPO. It was a brief but incredibly rewarding trip.
This issue first went out to subscribers of our LinkedIn newsletter, AI Era Development Stories, on July 15, 2026.
