CAM Copilots and the Next Digital Shift in American Machining

I recently sat down for a lengthy chat with Russ Bukowski, who for 15 years worked his way up through the ranks at Mastercam after graduating from Springfield Technical Community College in 2003. So far up the ladder did he climb that Bukowski, who looks younger than his graduation year might indicate, was named Mastercam’s new president this past April. 

Throughout his career at the company, Bukowski has been a trusted steward of Mastercam’s long-term vision. Based on our conversation, he is also skilled at synthesizing complex tech initiatives into practical courses of action.

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Like us all, Bukowski is keenly aware of the skilled labor shortage facing American metalworking businesses, and his characterization of the industry strikes a certain aspirational tone. “Manufacturing is a high-tech, white-collar job now,” he has been quoted as saying. He believes that a “digital renaissance” is happening — or will soon be happening — in U.S. manufacturing, enabled not just by automation but by the augmentation of human capabilities via artificial intelligence (AI).

“Especially for the SMEs,” Bukowski told me, referring to the small- and mid-sized enterprises that make up 80% of Mastercam’s customer base. “AI isn’t about replacing jobs. It’s about enabling people to work faster, smarter and stay competitive.”

As we recently reported, Mastercam has embedded “AI-enabled CAM intelligence” into its Mastercam 2026 product, which debuted to customers this past July. The platform includes access to Mastercam Copilot — a task-based interface that users can interact with via voice or text that essentially provides access to the company’s entire knowledge base. Bukowski says that Copilot can explain commands, walk through workflows, or execute certain functions in the software.

“You can say, ‘Set the display to wireframe mode,’ and it’ll do it for you,” Bukowski says. “You don’t even have to know the exact name of the command.”

But even Bukowski would argue that no one should be tossing their copies of Machinery’s Handbook out the window. As fast as AI is evolving, it’s not ready to fly solo. “We still have so much knowledge tied up in experienced programmers,” he says. “Feeds and speeds, how to use certain controls — there isn’t a large enough global knowledge base for an AI to reliably provide all of that. What we’re doing is offloading the tasks we do have reliable information for, so the user can focus on the complex problems that AI can’t solve yet.”

Solving the SME Challenge

When it comes to the specific challenges that make smaller shops question the use of AI, Bukowski points to three major sticking points:

Fear: Will AI replace skilled workers?

Trust: Can AI’s non-deterministic behavior — its tendency to produce different outputs from the same inputs — be trusted with expensive machines and materials?

Legal Ambiguity: Who owns the IP when AI is baked into the recipe? Is it the machine operator or company that used the AI? Is it the AI developer? Is AI-generated output even legally recognized as protected IP?

Bukowski says that these challenges are why Mastercam is focused on just two areas: education and control. “We’re not collecting part or process data from customers,” he explains. “We’re giving them suggestions based on our own data, and they decide what to do with it. From a legal and trust standpoint, that’s a very different model from some cloud-based generative tools.”

Mastercam’s status as an established, widely adopted platform puts it in a different position here. Rather than developing its own closed-loop system, the company is partnering with AI-focused startups like CloudNC and Lambda to embed intelligent features directly into its existing workflows.

“Think about CloudNC or Lambda Function,” Bukowski said. “They’re developing toolpath automation with us, and we’re staying agnostic. Our goal is to produce the best motion and support the most useful integrations — not to lock anyone into a walled garden.”

The Road Ahead for AI and CAM

So where does Bukowski see all of this headed? A place in the not-so-distant future where manufacturing ideas go from concept to code conversationally.

“CAD/CAM software is becoming a tool to bring ideas to life,” he says. “Eventually, you’re going to have someone explain to an AI what they want to build, let it draft the model and manufacturing program, and run it in a safe mode on the machine. Maybe it’s not optimized yet — but it gets you started. That’s the future.”

There are some AI sandboxes that Bukowski doesn’t see Mastercam playing in — predictive maintenance and machine-health, for example. So Mastercam partners with companies in those areas, too, which allows it to remain focused on its core programming and automation tools.

But Bukowski says the company is also mindful of the environments in which they operate and the “legal ambiguity” mentioned above. Sensitivities around IP ownership and national security are increasing demand for offline capabilities, he says. “We’re an on-premise software. You own it. Download it, you install it, you run it on your hardware. People are looking for that type of solution and that’s what we are today.”

So where are we headed? Bukowski believes that CAM programmers will only become more essential — even as their roles evolve. “They’ll be the ones adapting AI for their own use,” he said. “Long term, we’ll see a shift in what these professionals do — from executing routines to creating them. The value of their expertise is only going to go up.”