Additive Manufacturing Strategies 2026 Conference Signals Industry Warming Trend

The Additive Manufacturing Strategies 2026 conference wrapped February 26 with something the industry hasn't had in abundance lately: actual optimism. Not the performative kind you get in press releases, but the measured, we-know-what-we-need-to-do variety that comes from people who've been grinding through two consecutive rough years.

AMS Chair and 3DPrint.com editor Joris Peel set the tone from the opening session with a keynote titled "3D Printing in a Fractious World," which is about as honest a framing of the current landscape as you'll find. The conference ran February 24–26, 2026, and a winter storm added some logistical drama before the first day was even done.

That storm delayed Stratasys CEO Yoav Zeif's arrival, pushing his keynote to day two. Organizers streamed the speech online for attendees who couldn't make it in person, which meant his remarks reached a wider audience than the weather might have otherwise allowed. Zeif didn't sugarcoat 2025: he called it "another challenging year for the industry" and pointed to uncertainty, high interest rates, and long sales cycles as the specific headwinds that have been grinding AM adoption down. But his conclusion wasn't gloomy. "We are on the right path. It is in our hands. There is no magic here. It is in our hands to do it, and we know exactly what we need to do."

His strategic argument was built around a CNC machining analogy that's worth paying attention to. CNC took roughly 40 years to become a mainstream manufacturing method, and it got there by systematically removing operational barriers: smaller equipment footprints, more user-friendly interfaces, standardized programming, and CAD software interoperability. Zeif's position was direct: "We can almost copy-paste that strategy." He also pointed to the surge in low-end desktop printers not as a threat to industrial AM, but as a market expander. "Low requirements in that space drive awareness and we enlarge the entire cake," he said, adding that an emerging middle tier between consumer machines and full industrial systems is developing around molding and tooling applications.

The business headline of the conference came from Formlabs CEO Max Lobovsky, who announced that his private company had hit a $2 billion valuation. For a company that has stayed private while much of the AM sector went through rough public market corrections, that number landed with some weight in the room.

John Barnes, founder of The Barnes Global Advisors and CEO of Metal Powder Works, also addressed attendees. Carbon CEO Phil DeSimone presented alongside staff from Riddell on 3D printed liners for football helmets, a concrete end-use application that puts printed parts inside equipment that takes serious impact loads.

Digital Engineering published its overview of the conference on March 10, 2026 under the headline "AM Industry is Warming Up," which captures the prevailing mood accurately. The industry is still working through structural challenges, but the tone at AMS 2026 was less about survival and more about execution.