Last week I attended the 8th annual AMS conference in New York, where attendees discussed the additive manufacturing industry.
This is a relatively small event as compared to the monster tradeshows such as Formnext and Rapid+TCT, but the smaller format allowed for more discussion among presenters and 200ish attendees.
Heading into this event, I wondered whether the mood would be positive or negative. After all, in 2024, there were multiple major failures in the 3D print industry, with some companies even going out of business. Investment sentiment reached an all-time low after several high-profile players didn’t make good on the massive investments poured into them.
Surprisingly, the mood was, well, not entirely positive, but at least optimistic.
The thinking went something like this: the old way of companies raising huge piles of cash and attempting to spend their way to success has been conclusively proven wrong. Most of the companies that pursued that strategy have either disappeared or hobbled in one way or another.
That leaves the survivors, companies that, at smaller scales, have been successful thus far. What was their secret?
It’s quite simple: they are selling applications, not printers. Somehow, in spite of years of selling “boxes”, it turns out that customers don’t really want the boxes.
They want the parts that come out of the boxes.
3D print tech is entirely new to many customers, and they just aren’t in a position to make the huge effort to figure it out themselves. So they don’t proceed. Successful companies implement services that help these customers figure out how to make their parts — with the vendor’s equipment — and then boxes are sold. But really, the customer is buying the application all along.
Many surviving companies know this, and that’s one of the reasons they are growing well, even in the doom and gloom.
Another factor discussed was the current geopolitical situation. As everyone knows, there are conflicts both active and brewing in various areas of the world, leading to more activity in the defence sector. Additive manufacturing has significant benefits in defence applications due to the ability to produce lightweight parts.
Now we have a scenario where we have equipment manufacturers able to assist customers and prospects, and a growing market sector. The gloom is beginning to dissipate, and at the conference, many expressed optimism for the future.
This sequence of events seems to match Gartner’s Hype Cycle quite well. Gartner believes that new technologies almost always follow a standard lifecycle of customer attention, and it goes something like this:
- Technology trigger: The new technology appears and is used only by early adopters willing to put up with immature products.
- Peak of inflated expectations: Media (and company promoters) exaggerate the benefits of the technology, leading to overly optimistic notions of what the tech can do, along with excessive investments.
- Trough of disillusionment: The tech was never able to meet the exaggerated expectations, and now everyone realizes that is the case, causing a rapid drop in customer and investment interest.
- Slope of enlightenment: The more challenging conditions cause (some) of the tech providers to investigate new approaches, leading to the discovery of methods that actually provide significant benefit to customers.
- Plateau of productivity: With new approaches mature, sales begin to scale as the technology becomes more rapidly adopted.
Where are we on this cycle? While individual companies and technologies might be placed at different spots, in general, I believe we are now just starting to emerge from the dreaded “trough of disillusionment”, and that maps to the optimistic view seen at the AMS 2025 conference.
