Product Development Predictions in 2025: AI, Agile, Additive

Back in 2022, I wrote about the triple threat of additive, agility and automation—three forces that were already reshaping manufacturing and product development.

Fast forward to 2025, and these trends have evolved into even more powerful drivers of innovation, with AI taking a leading role alongside agile methodologies and additive manufacturing.

While the 2022 conversation was focused on improving efficiency and flexibility, the advancements of the past few years have pushed these concepts into new territory—where automation is smarter, agility extends beyond processes to culture and additive manufacturing scales from not only better prototyping but increasingly to full production.

As we step into 2025, the pace of innovation in product development is accelerating like never before. I see three key trends for product developers – the three “A”’s: artificial intelligence (AI), agile process, and additive manufacturing. These developments aren't just changing the tools we use—they're fundamentally transforming how we design, build and bring products to market.

Here are my predictions for how AI, agile, and additive will shape the future of our industry in the coming year.

1. AI Will Be Every Engineer’s Companion

Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot have already proven their value in many engineers’ daily design work, asking questions about design decisions and giving advice on design and CAD strategies. But in 2025, AI will move beyond being a tool to becoming an active collaborator. I see a huge number of exciting AI applications in design:

Generative design as a standard: AI-driven generative design tools will become more popular, producing optimized solutions that human engineers might never consider. These tools will seamlessly handle constraints like material properties, manufacturability and sustainability.

AI-Powered decision support: Engineers will increasingly rely on AI to analyze massive datasets, predict performance outcomes and recommend design improvements. AI-powered digital engineering tools that accelerate physics simulation through "simulation surrogates” are helping designers make faster, smarter decisions throughout the product lifecycle. AI models trained on numerical analysis can run simulations up to 1,000 times faster.

Human-AI collaboration: The best results will come from teams that embrace a symbiotic relationship between AI and human creativity. AI can help human engineers answer questions by doing the legwork and analysis on documents and information. AI will provide expert advice to engineers on how to use other computing tools like CAD, PDM, Simulation, etc, much like expert human engineers provide advice to their colleagues. The latest conceptual industrial design tools take simple sketches and generate rendered design concepts based on text prompts, such as "orange and black controller, Nintendo-like." Meanwhile, AI assistants for CAM software can quickly produce machining strategies, reducing time spent on CAM programming and making manufacturing processes more efficient.

Customer-centric design: AI will also play a significant role in aligning products with customer preferences. The latest AI product development solutions mine product reviews and other customer feedback data to synthesize design directions tailored to consumer tastes or specific attributes like performance. This insight can help teams create products that better meet market demands.

2. Agile Process Will Drive Hardware Speed and Innovation

Agile principles—rapid iteration, cross-functional collaboration and customer-centric design—have transformed software development. In 2025, these principles will continue to become more popular in hardware development as well. Here's how:

Continuous prototyping: Agile hardware teams will leverage rapid prototyping and digital twins to iterate on designs in faster and faster time cycles, reducing the time from concept to production and increasing the amount of iteration and innovation. For example, Omnirobotic creates and manufactures robots that automate challenging industrial tasks and leverage rapid prototyping and cloud-native CAD to accelerate their product development process. By quickly iterating on 3D-printed prototypes and incorporating feedback into their designs, they have significantly reduced development time and improved efficiency.

Integrated digital workflows: Cloud-native platforms enable hardware teams to be much more agile. One reason: they enable real-time collaboration across global teams, breaking down silos between design, engineering and manufacturing. Everyone will work from a single source of truth, accelerating innovation.

Agile teams and supply chains: Many factors—including new tariffs, regulations, supply chain disruptions, war, politics, etc.—are causing companies to need to change suppliers, locations, products and personnel faster than ever. Cloud-native tools and agile process support this. There’s simply no time to deal with old-fashioned special computers, software installs and file-based PDM locking and copying.

Customer feedback loops: Agile product development will prioritize early and frequent customer feedback, ensuring that products meet real-world needs and reduce the risk of costly redesigns. With cloud-based CAD and PLM tools, manufacturers can interact with digital prototypes in real-time, leaving comments, annotations and suggested modifications directly in the design. Additionally, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) can allow manufacturers to experience digital models in immersive environments and provide contextual feedback before manufacturing begins.

3. Additive Manufacturing: Faster and More Versatile

Additive manufacturing (AM) is changing every year. Design and manufacturing will take advantage of not only new 3D printers in 2025, but also new materials and software that all together drive new ways to use additive.

Speed and its benefits: 3D printers are getting faster. A lot faster. The latest iterations can be up to five times faster than their predecessor printers. When you can make a prototype five times faster than before, you don’t just do the old processes faster; you use new processes – like agile process, for example. Hardware can become more like software, with multiple iterations a day not out of the question.

Mass customization: AI and machine learning will play a larger role in enabling truly personalized products at scale, optimizing designs based on customer preferences and real-time feedback. This will lead to faster and more cost-effective production of personalized items, from medical implants to consumer goods, allowing even small-scale manufacturers to compete with traditional mass production.

Distributed manufacturing: Additive will enable production to move closer to the end customer, reducing lead times and environmental impact. Digital databases will replace physical inventory, and manufacturing will happen on demand.

Hybrid processes: The integration of additive with traditional manufacturing techniques can integrate data feedback loops for enhanced precision in multi-material and complex geometry production. This hybrid approach will be used to create high-performance, lightweight parts for industries like aerospace and automotive, expanding the use of additive manufacturing for critical, high-precision applications.

The Intersection of AI, Agile and Additive

The most exciting innovations in 2025 will happen at the intersection of these three trends. Imagine this:

An AI-driven platform works alongside human engineers to generate a product design optimized for additive manufacturing, refining it in real-time using customer feedback and sentiment analysis to identify trends and guide design improvements.
Agile teams collaborate with cloud-native tools across the globe in real-time, using immersive virtual environments and AI-driven simulations to test and optimize designs instantly,, reducing barriers between time zones and creating faster decision-making capabilities..
Additive manufacturing enables faster production of prototypes and final products, with minimal waste and maximum flexibility.

This convergence will shorten development cycles, raise innvation, reduce costs and unlock entirely new business models.

To thrive in this new era, companies must embrace these technologies and reimagine their workflows. The opportunities are immense for those who are ready to innovate, collaborate, and adapt. Here's to a great 2025!