Why Additive Manufacturing Adoption Looks the Way It Does — Part III

• The development of additive manufacturing has closely tracked broader trends in industrial digitalization. Additive manufacturing is digital at its point of origin. Geometry, process parameters, and machine instructions are all...

The development of additive manufacturing has closely tracked broader trends in industrial digitalization. Additive manufacturing is digital at its point of origin. Geometry, process parameters, and machine instructions are all derived from digital data. This has made AM compatible with, and increasingly dependent on, wider digital manufacturing infrastructures. The force shaping this phase has been the growing use of digital tools across product development and production. Model-based definition, simulation-driven design, and software-managed quality systems have become more common. As these practices spread, expectations around data consistency, traceability, and system integration increased. Additive manufacturing did not drive this shift, but it was affected by it more directly than m