At IMTS 2026, a session titled 'Making Machines Conversational: Connecting Manufacturing Equipment to AI Chat Agents' explains how modern manufacturing equipment can be connected to AI chat agents to access real-time and historical data through industrial protocols such as OPC UA, MTConnect, fieldbus systems, and HTTP-based APIs.

Andy Joseph, VP of Engineering at Promess, will outline how to build an AI-ready technical corpus by combining machine documentation, real-time data feeds, context, and historical data, and will share optimization strategies to improve AI response accuracy, reduce hallucinations, and boost explainability on the shop floor.

The session includes lessons from a real-world deployment that linked a Promess electromechanical assembly press to Claude AI, culminating in a live demonstration of conversational interaction with production equipment.

Attendees will learn architecture considerations, data preparation, and integration approaches to deploy conversational AI on the manufacturing floor using existing machine communication standards.

The session is set for Thursday morning, September 17, in IMTS52 Room W192-A, as part of a conference featuring 69 presentations on process innovation, plant operations, quality/inspection, and automation.

The demonstration features tools like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enable AI agents such as ChatGPT and Claude to interface with CNC machines, assembly systems, and process equipment for natural language diagnostics and actionable insights.

Andy Joseph brings over 28 years in software, controls, and manufacturing systems, holding multiple U.S. patents and focusing on applying machine learning, cloud technologies, and conversational AI to manufacturing equipment.