Operations Calling 2026: Tulip Impresses Technologically at the Expense of Its People-First Positioning

At its Boston Operations Calling 2026 event (the first of three globally dispersed events in 2026), Tulip Interfaces laid out a densely packed swath of new product and service announcements that were centered around three core manufacturing processes: build, run/orchestrate, and scale.

In terms of overall announcements, Projects and Code based apps grabbed the most attention. The latter is aimed at addressing many of the existing dangers around Artificial Intelligence (AI)-coded apps, letting engineers create custom frontline applications with their own Investigational Device Exemptions (IDEs) and AI coding agents—but backing this with a platform that automatically mandates zero-trust Information Technology (IT) security, operator attribution, and site portability. Every app created contains a Git pull request to the shop floor, enforcing to the engineer that each code-based app contains a fully audited version designed for regulated environments. Projects, by contrast, is an overhead management interface that lets its user view, strategize, and connect every app, automation, agent, table, and connector into one production system. It is streamlined comprehensive visibility into the factory floor.  

The other announcements highlighted Tulip’s focus, one that is increasing common among Manufacturing Execution System (MES) providers: the need for a single, all-encompassing, easily validated, and governed record. Industrial Connectivity, for instance, serves as Tulip’s operational data layer. It draws existing machine information from drivers, historians, and Unified Namespace (UNS) into Tulip and combines it with near real-time human context. This data are directly linked to every process, such as order, step, station, and operator, with the goal of recording human action and reasoning—in addition to all actions the machine took.

Factory Playback, which relies heavily on Tulip’s partnership with NVIDIA, further increases the oversight onto the factory floor. All locally-installed, edge camera streams are combined with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to provide an overview of the complete history of movement and activity, both human and machine. This will aid in root cause analysis, and pull yet more data into Tulip’s system to provide more context for operations and proposed efficiency improvements. This level of comprehensive understanding is crucial to solving manufacturer pain points and will help erase siloed data from the equation—provided the manufacturer is willing.

This willingness is the human factor that Tulip overlooked. During the keynote, CEO Natan Linder openly challenged the manufacturers in the room by saying they had two choices: stay with legacy, monolithic platforms that market AI rather than fully integrate it, or move to a platform with purpose-built AI solutions. “There is no Option 3,” he said. He is wrong.

Tulip is far from the only industrial software provider to stress a more technologically advanced manufacturing landscape than actually exists, but considering that MES is a large focus of Tulip’s platform, the claim is even more dubious. Today, in 2026, an incredible portion of manufacturing companies still rely on home-grown MES solutions, including paper-based systems and Excel/Python concoctions. They have not even reached the level of a “traditional MES system” to consider replacing it.

So, Option 3 is this: stay with the in-house solution and hope it perpetually works. Unfortunately, a presentation on advanced AI solutions is unlikely to sway this audience, as this is the same group unmoved by a decade+ of digital transformation and digital thread narratives.

Tulip’s, or any MES provider’s, best bet to convince this audience actually centers around Linder’s core messaging: AI should only exist to make people better. Manufacturers are incredibly practical by necessity. They do not care about advanced technology for its own sake. They want solutions that move the needle, and securing that buy-in takes continued work and patience. One customer at the event stated it took 4 years to fully complete the integration, but that it was worth it as it took master-level training courses from 10 years down to 2, among other benefits. These are the stories and the value that will make Option 3 a thing of the past. Tulip would be wise to put them more front-and-center in its keynotes going forward.