CloudNC’s AI Will Quote a Machined Part for $2.50 as AI Agents Spread Across CAM

CloudNC has launched Quote Agent, an AI tool that turns a machine shop’s request for quote into a reviewed estimate in minutes instead of hours. A shop forwards the RFQ email or uploads 2D drawings and 3D models, and the agent flags manufacturing risks, proposes a manufacturing plan with routing times, and estimates material, post-processing and inspection costs. The manual quoting workflow is free with no limit on users, and the AI agent costs $2.50 per part after a free trial, with bulk discounts. CloudNC says about 90% of quotes are lost, which is why it argues speed matters.

The estimator still decides whether to quote, adjusts the plan and costs, sets the price and sends the PDF. When the drawing is missing information, the agent asks questions instead of guessing. CloudNC says the agent combines its own physics models with large language models, and shops describe their machines, costs, stocked materials and preferences in a profile called Myshop so estimates fit their floor. It also produces design-for-manufacture reports, ballooned drawings with numbered inspection callouts and first article inspection reports, with the inspection reports also exportable to Excel.

A metal technician wearing safety glasses faces down an aluminum block on a milling machine. — Quote Agent estimates routing and machining time before a part like this reaches the mill. Photo: Senior Airman Brittany Bateman, U.S. Air Force, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Quoting is the newest piece. CloudNC’s older product, CAM Assist, generates machining strategies for 3-axis and 3+2-axis work, and it is now an add-on for GibbsCAM, joining its versions for Mastercam, Siemens NX and Fusion. Programmers configure machines, materials and tool assemblies, then use a Strategy Editor to inspect, adjust and approve the AI’s suggestions before they go back into the CAM system. The release notes show CAM Assist for GibbsCAM 2.2.3 on Oct. 16 and CAM Assist for Mastercam 2.2.6 on Oct. 21.

The large CAM vendors are building the same kind of assistant into their own products. Canadian Metalworking reports that Mastercam 2026.R2 cut one verification run from nearly 90 minutes on the CPU to just over 22 minutes on the GPU, and that its Copilot assistant supports about 200 toolpath types and can change feeds and speeds across operations by voice or text, with confirmation prompts. Cimatron, part of Sandvik, has a CAM Agent built with Limitless Labs that generates complete 3-axis toolpaths from part geometry and the shop’s tool library. Autodesk’s new System Modeler can chain finding the body, creating a milling setup, picking a face mill from the library and generating the toolpath, and Fusion’s October update adds a shared Stock Material Library for setups.

A quality inspector in a pink cleanroom gown and cap holds a circuit board while checking it on a first article inspection machine with a monitor showing the board layout. — First article inspection reports are among the documents Quote Agent drafts for review. Photo: Encik Tekateki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The same article carries the warning that matters most: an AI toolpath can be technically valid and still wrong for the real machine, workholding, tooling and material, so it has to be fully simulated and proven out, and someone should watch the simulation instead of just running it. That is why faster simulation, like the GPU engine in SolidCAM 2026, matters as much as the AI itself. Not every gain is AI, either. OPEN MIND’s hyperMILL 2026 redesigned its 5-axis rest machining algorithms and added a Minimum Clearance Angle option for safer automatic tool orientation. The open gap is that the quote, the program and the inspection plan are still built by separate tools, so the routing time a shop sells may not match the cycle time it later programs.

N23D is being built in Rust so the quote, the CAM program and the inspection plan come from one part model and one description of the shop, feeding ERP and QMS without re-entry. Any estimate or toolpath a machine suggests is recorded as machine-made and needs a person’s approval before it is released, and the cycle time that was quoted can be compared with the time the final program actually takes.

Sources

Featured photo: A CNC milling machine cuts a part from aluminum bar stock at the 542nd Support Maintenance Company machine shop, Joint Base Lewis-McChord. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Austan Owen, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.