The shop floor is changing. The tools should keep up.
CruxAGI is a local AI appliance for job shops. It reads the data you already have, respects the vendors you already use, and refuses to hallucinate. Built by a family that includes the next generation the industry is trying to attract.
The workforce that built this industry is gone.
The boomers who ran your machines for 40 years retired or quit. The specialists who knew — by feel, by sound, by decades of experience — which tool was wearing wrong on which material at which spindle speed took that knowledge with them. The middle generation moved up, moved out, or moved into supervision. The younger generation was told for 20 years that manufacturing wasn't a career for them.
Now your shop has fewer people than it did in 2019, running the same equipment, quoting the same jobs. The tribal knowledge is thinner. The margin for error is smaller. Every consumable you over-order and every tool you replace early adds up faster than it used to.
You don't need another dashboard. You need an intelligence layer that captures what your specialists knew and makes it usable by the operators you have.
What CruxAGI does.
CruxAGI reads the data you already have — VMI transactions (Auto-Crib, Fastenal FMI, Kennametal ToolBOSS, or your vendor of choice), CNC controller streams (Haas, Mazak, Fanuc, DMG Mori via MTConnect, OPC-UA, Ethernet/IP, and Modbus), CMM measurements, CAM post output, ERP job history — and correlates across all of it to find what your current dashboards can't.
- Which tools are being replaced before they're actually worn.
- Which operators, shifts, and jobs consume tooling outside optimal patterns.
- Which machines are burning consumables that don't match their part output.
- Where your consumables ordering cadence is misaligned with your actual usage.
You keep your vendors. No rip-and-replace. CruxAGI is the intelligence layer that sits above the vendor systems you already trust.
First-year documented savings at the 5% operational target from 25 years of technical tooling sales. At the 3% historical floor: $180K.
Year 1 total cost (implementation + equipment lease): approximately $122K. Year 2+ ongoing cost drops to about $8,900/year with the same working system.
The ROI curve bends further in your favor every year — the opposite of every SaaS vendor you've evaluated.
What's different.
Runs on your floor.
A $499-class appliance sits on your network. Your data doesn't leave the building. ITAR and DFARS-friendly by design.
Vendor-agnostic.
Works with what you have. Sandvik CoroPlus, Auto-Crib, Mastercam, whoever you use. No forced migrations.
Refuses to hallucinate.
The substrate fails closed. When it doesn't know, it says so. Every insight is traceable back to the raw data that produced it. Your quality auditor can follow the receipt.
Owner-operator support.
You get me, personally, for the implementation year. Not a channel partner. Not a support tier. Me.
The substrate.
CruxAGI runs on Athena — an AI architecture built on coupled-oscillator dynamics, not tokens. No large language model, no transformer, no next-token predictor anywhere in the cognitive path. Meaning is carried as a dynamical field over a fixed geometric substrate and read out as structured geometric objects.
The full architecture and empirical results are documented in the public whitepaper.
READ THE WHITEPAPERHow to start.
A pilot begins with a two-hour on-site visit. I bring the appliance. We look at 30 days of your historical VMI data together, and I show you what the substrate finds.
That visit is free, non-binding, and it's how you decide whether the first quarter is worth $26K to you.
If it's not, no hard feelings. I'll leave you with the observations from that visit anyway. If it is, we sign a quarter-by-quarter engagement and start the following month.
APPLYSEE THE FULL APPROACHDennis Kidwell · Founder · Tomball, Texas · Veteran-owned (USAF, 2002–2008)