AI is playing a much bigger role in PTC’s success and future.
In its third-quarter report and on a subsequent call with Wall Street analysts, the company’s leadership gave clear indications of the importance of AI in meeting the market challenges of its customer base.
Neil Barua, president and chief executive officer of PTC, said in the quarterly report that the company’s customers “increasingly recognize the importance of our Intelligent Product Lifecycle vision. This coincides with the go-to-market and product strategy emphasis the company has undertaken over the past several quarters and results in a more durable business model that positions PTC for long-term success.”
Barua said AI has become “a key discussion point in customer conversations, and PTC is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this growing customer interest in AI. The need to modernize product data foundations [to] appropriately leverage AI is becoming clear to organizations, all while PTC establishes an intelligence layer to enable AI capabilities over our trusted solutions across CAD, PLM, ALM and SLM.”
PTC’s FlexPLM serves the fashion apparel and retail market, a platform that has undergone significant changes in the past 20 years. And more changes may be on the way.
On the call with analysts, Barua said PTC’s customers “face growing pressure to shorten development cycles, improve resilience and compete in an AI-driven world. They understand that their product data is a strategic enterprise asset to help drive better decisions and are turning to our [solutions] of record to build their product data foundations.”
Moving forward, the CEO said AI will be “a tailwind for our business because AI requires our systems of record and the product data stored in them to be effective.”
Regarding the recent launch of Onshape Labs, Barua said it is strongly positioned for AI. “Its cloud-native architecture, highly scalable data model and built-in collaboration make it ideal for AI workflows with humans in the loop.” The CEO said more broadly, PTC’s customers “tell us our embedded AI capabilities are the fastest path to adoption and value because AI is delivered in the context of trusted systems and governed workflows.”
This is in contrast to other AI solutions that are “bolted on” to existing systems.
The evolution of FlexPLM
FlexPLM finds its genesis with PTC’s acquisition of Aptavis Technology in 2005, which the company then turned into the formal launch of the FlexPLM solution.
The premise from that initial launch was that the development of retail, footwear and apparel products was becoming as complex as engineered products such as planes and automobiles, and the sector deserved the same level of precision and control.
By 2015, PTC Retail became a dedicated and autonomous business unit of PTC. The market took this as a sign PTC was investing in retail as a first-class market instead of a side offering of its core engineering PLM.
Several releases and updates of FlexPLM occurred during the 2010s as the company continued a build-out of core retail and apparel workflows. The platform helped retailers and brands accelerate their digital transformations. Design, sourcing, supply chain, pricing and merchandising evolved into one connected suite instead of siloed tools.
In early 2021, PTC released version 12 of FlexPLM as well as a redesigned user interface. Brands such as Ralph Lauren publicly praised the release, calling it an exciting step in the platform’s evolution. Soon after, FlexPLM incorporated new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and augmented reality. And then came investments in AI and machine learning to drive speed and improve decision-making for retailers and brands.
In 2025, FlexPLM celebrated its 20th anniversary, and PTC marked 40 years in business.
And at the National Retail Federation’s Retail Big Show earlier this year, PTC announced new AI capabilities for FlexPLM that automate tech pack creation, which is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone steps in retail product development. With the upgrade, product teams can automatically extract data from design drawings and instantly populate bills of materials (BOMs), measurements, construction details, attributes and colorways, thereby cutting manual data entry between design and development teams.
PTC positions this as part of a broader “Intelligent Product Lifecycle” vision, which combines structured product data with AI to improve decision-making, streamline workflows and boost productivity across the product lifecycle.
