The RFQs are coming in. Your machines have capacity. But the quotes are waiting on the same handful of people who are already busy keeping the shop running. Quoting takes experience, eats up valuable time, and comes with an especially frustrating reality: much of that effort goes into jobs you'll never win. And when a purchase order comes back immediately, your first thought might be, "What did we miss?"
Recorded live at IMTS, we welcome CloudNC co-founder Theo Saville back to MakingChips, alongside Jason Bowes, to talk about this hidden bottleneck—and how AI could help relieve it. Building on CAM Assist, their AI tool for automating repetitive CAM programming tasks, CloudNC is expanding into quoting and estimating. Their approach starts with preparing the quote, surfacing risks, and generating an initial routing so an experienced person can review the work instead of building everything from scratch.
With more than 1,000 shops now using CloudNC's technology, Theo and Jason share what they've learned since Theo's previous appearance, including lessons from running their own aerospace and defense shop. We discuss why quote turnaround matters, where chasing precision becomes counterproductive, and how estimates, programming decisions, and actual cycle times should inform one another.
We also revisit Theo's original ambition: making CNC manufacturing as simple as submitting a part and pressing go. How close are we? What still needs to happen? And how do you earn the trust of experienced machinists who will be responsible for the results? With growing demand putting pressure on shops to deliver faster, this conversation explores where AI can help today—and what it will take to go further.