Build custom apps and save time with autonomous agents, fed straight from the source of your shop’s own live data. All ITAR-secure and hosted on Microsoft Gov Cloud.
Minneapolis, MN — Fulcrum, the manufacturing software platform used by 700+ job shops and fabricators, has launched its native AI platform, Archie. Archie is designed to let shop owners and production managers ask questions, build custom apps, and deploy autonomous agents all from inside Fulcrum.
For ITAR-registered shops handling Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), the AI boom has been off-limits. Using public access LLMs with shop data can be a compliance violation because these models may train on inputs and can then reshare private information to inform other users. Meanwhile, if a shop were to independently decide to build a self-hosted, government-cloud AI stack capable of handling CUI, this would cost north of $1M per year to run.
Archie is a solution for the entire network of manufacturers. Shops running Fulcrum get enterprise-grade AI at a fraction of the cost it would take for them to host it themselves.
One Platform Connects Everything
With Archie, the following features will be available to Fulcrum users:
Archie Chat. Ask Archie which jobs are at risk this week, what a customer’s true cost history looks like, which vendors keep missing dates — anything you’d like. Archie reads live Fulcrum data and answers directly. You can even prompt it to help you take actions like changing a due date, leaving a note on a job, or updating a record.
In beta: Archie Build. Describe the dashboard or tool your shop has always needed. Archie builds a real, functional app on your live Fulcrum data in minutes. Custom apps publish to a dedicated space where anyone on your team can open and run them. If you decide to, you can share what you’ve built with the Fulcrum manufacturing network (and other shops can share their tools with you too).
Releasing soon: Archie Agents. Deploy custom agents to handle recurring work on their own. These agents can autonomously schedule and complete tasks. Examples include reorder check-ins, status alerts, and follow-up drafts. You set the rules for how these agents work. Archie doesn’t act without your explicit authorization.
Securely Build the Tools Your Shop Needs
The difference between Archie and using a public AI tool, or an add-on AI offered by a legacy manufacturing software, is secure access to clean, comprehensive data in Fulcrum.
Fulcrum shops run all operations digitally. Every job, routing, cost, vendor record, and customer interaction lives in a single live system. Thanks to this, shops who use Fulcrum average 3.4x more operational data than shops on other platforms. When Archie answers a question or builds an app, it’s drawing on the full picture of how a shop runs. The reports and the information are more reliable, thorough, and actionable.
“Archie isn’t a chatbot we’ve stapled onto Fulcrum. It’s the AI layer of a platform built from the ground up to capture live shop data. The reason Archie can take action is because Fulcrum already owns the record. No other manufacturing AI can say that.”
— Sunny Han, Fulcrum Founder & CEO
For customers who are ITAR-registered, all of Archie’s processing, storage, and data handling happens inside Fulcrum’s Microsoft Azure Government Cloud environment, not in a general-purpose cloud environment. Azure Government Cloud is a separate, walled-off version of Microsoft’s cloud that’s restricted to US persons and meets the data-handling requirements ITAR imposes on controlled technical data.
A standard commercial cloud environment (even a secure one) doesn’t meet that bar on its own. What this means is: no part of an ITAR customer’s Archie usage touches Fulcrum’s regular commercial infrastructure or any non-Gov-Cloud service.
High-Growth Shops are Early Adopters
Fulcrum’s job is straightforward: give shops the tools to run better as the industry changes around them.
Archie is the next piece of that. More shops are asking for AI they can actually use inside their compliance requirements, and this is our answer. Users today span sheet metal fabrication, precision CNC machining, and aerospace-grade manufacturing, a cross-section of the job shop market where AI has historically been unavailable or non-compliant.
We see this spreading fast among CNC and fab shops looking to compete and produce quality on par with the demands of the major contractors who hire them.
How to Learn More:
- See Archie in action.
- New to Fulcrum? Tell us how you’d like to use AI. Book a call today.
- Meet us at Fulcrum’s IMTS booth in Chicago, IL, September 14–19, 2026, or attend Sunny Han’s session on Making AI Trustworthy for Manufacturers at Fabtech in Las Vegas, NV, Thursday, October 22, 2026.