The Next Era of Connected Enterprise: MCP, Agentic AI, and Beyond | Propulsion 2026

The rules of manufacturing are being rewritten in real time: rising costs, fractured supply chains, geopolitical disruption, and an AI revolution that is moving faster than most organizations can absorb. The companies that come out ahead will be the ones who connect their people, their product data, and their systems before the window closes.

At Propulsion 2026, Propel CEO Ross Meyercord and Chief Product Officer Eric Schrader took the stage to lay out what that connected future looks like, and how Propel is building it. Drawing on Deloitte's latest manufacturing outlook, a closed-door Washington symposium, and Propel's own product roadmap, they mapped the economic headwinds, political dynamics, and technology shifts reshaping product companies today.

Including live demos, shown by Mike Prom, of Model Context Protocol (MCP), DesignHub, and Propel One's embedded, composable, and networked AI capabilities, this keynote is a masterclass in where product lifecycle management is headed and what your team can start doing about it right now. Propel engineers are already 50% more productive using AI-assisted development, and that same productivity unlock is now being built for you.

Jump to Product Demos

DesignHub: Start at 23:11. Automate CAD data ingestion from SolidWorks and OrCAD into PLM, with full BOM integrity and supplier collaboration built in.

Composable AI: Start at 34:59. Build custom agents and flows directly in Propel using natural language, then deploy them through Slack or any connected channel.

Networked AI via MCP: Start at 39:39. Query Propel data, create change orders, and update BOMs from any MCP-enabled AI client, including Claude and ChatGPT.

Key Takeaways

Smart Manufacturing Is the Bright Spot in a Turbulent Economy

Rising material costs, labor pressures, and trade uncertainty are weighing on capital investment across the industry. But Deloitte's research shows virtually every manufacturer surveyed is already using some form of smart manufacturing, including IoT, AI, and advanced analytics, to offset those headwinds and drive future productivity.

MCP Is the New Standard for Enterprise AI Interoperability

Model Context Protocol, introduced by Anthropic roughly 18 months ago, has become the connective tissue for AI-powered enterprises. Instead of building costly point-to-point integrations, MCP lets systems share data and execute processes in natural language, and Propel’s MCP server makes Propel a full participant in that ecosystem today.

Your Propel Data Is Now Accessible from Anywhere

With Propel’s MCP server, coming later in 2026, users can query and update Propel from any MCP-enabled AI client, such as Claude or ChatGPT, without logging into Propel directly. That means faster answers for quick lookups, agent-to-agent automation for complex processes, and deep in-app work for detailed analysis, all from a unified product data foundation.

Propel One Puts AI to Work Across Your Real Operational Workflows

‍From interrogating a 40-page spec document to expediting a change order by surfacing open items and generating tasks, Propel One's pre-configured agents handle the time-consuming work embedded directly in your daily processes. And because agents can be invoked from tools like Slack, teams in the field can capture rich incident details, including photos, and have a fully structured record created in Propel automatically.

DesignHub Closes the Gap Between Engineering and the Entire Value Chain

DesignHub ingests CAD files, maps metadata, enriches components with supply chain data, and threads that design information through to contract manufacturers, suppliers, marketing, and field service. The result is one connected product record that every persona across the lifecycle can act on, without anything getting lost in translation.

Composable AI Lets Your Team Build Custom Agents Without Starting from Scratch

Propel One’s agent builder gives teams a library of pre-built skills, flow templates, and an AI-assisted creation tool so they can assemble custom workflows for their specific processes. The Slack-based field incident capture shown live is one example: built fast, reusable, and tied directly to structured Propel data.

From AI to ROI – the insights are waiting. Watch all Propulsion 2026 sessions.

Learn More

Want to see the AI layer that powers everything shown in this keynote?

Explore Propel One to learn how Propel's embedded, composable, and networked AI agents connect your product data across every system and every team, so your organization spends less time chasing information and more time building better products.

About Propulsion 2026

Propulsion brings together everything product and manufacturing leaders need to know in one place. Bringing you Propel’s boldest platform reveals, critical AI and market insights from top industry analysts, and real customer results. These sessions are designed to cut through the noise so you can put what matters most to work immediately.