ACE2026 Conference Report: AI Collaboration and DTM's Aras SaaS Migration

Zionex
May 9
3 min read

Zionex offers DTM （Dynamic Task Manager), an add-on solution for Aras Innovator, a leading PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) platform. This year, Aras hosted ACE2026 from April 13–16, 2026, and we sent a team of four from Japan — including Ito, our Executive Officer and DTM Business Lead — along with three colleagues from our Korean office, including their CEO.

The conference was held at the Hilton Miami Downtown, under the theme "Adaptive Intelligence." Below is Ito's first-hand report from the event.

Why We Attended

We had three main goals for this trip:

Get up to speed on Aras' latest initiatives and strategic direction
Connect with customers and partners we could meet in person
As an ISV partner, share progress on DTM's Aras SaaS compatibility and explore future possibilities with Innovator Edge

Keynote: Three Strategic Pillars

At ACE2025 in Boston, the theme was "Connected Intelligence," with discussions centered on how PLM digital threads could open up new possibilities for collaboration and AI adoption.

This year, newly appointed CEO Leon Lauritsen — who stepped into the role last September — laid out three core strategies:

Market Disruption — We won't win against the big three playing by their rules.
Customer Obsession — We need to be obsessed with customer value delivery.
People Create Impact — Execution is everything — and it depends on people that make this mission personal.

Aras also outlined the key focus areas it's investing in to address growing complexity across products, regulations, supply chains, and digital infrastructure: full PLM capabilities, data integration, redefining the user experience, AI governance, agentic intelligence, large-scale performance, and a continuous learn-evolve-act cycle.

A demo showcased a feature where AI agents automatically generate and propose data model definitions based on natural language instructions.

CTO Session: Rebuilding the PLM Application Hub

CTO Rob McAveney's session focused on rebuilding Aras' PLM application hub, organized around two themes: "Human to Agent Experience" and "Agent to Agent Experience."

The rapid evolution of AI is fundamentally reshaping what UI even means — a trend that became impossible to ignore over the past year. It reinforced both a sense of urgency and the importance of moving with speed.

The way we work is shifting toward conversational, task-oriented, and autonomous models. The clear message: product design must now treat AI delegation as a default assumption, not an edge case.

Demos highlighted several compelling features:

Automatically generating a natural-language description from an image attached to a PR
Converting PDF requirement specs into digital threads
Detecting changes in PRs and ECOs, then automatically generating summaries

Together, these capabilities promise to dramatically cut down the manual, multi-step work that has traditionally been unavoidable.

As we integrate AI into our own products, the framework Aras presented was genuinely useful: defining what the goal is, how to apply AI, where to execute it, and how to ensure governance, accountability, and visibility.

DTM Update: SaaS Migration and Innovator Edge

As in Boston, we had the opportunity to sit down with John Sperling to walk through DTM's development roadmap and discuss the challenges ahead.

DTM is currently undergoing a full rebuild for Aras SaaS compatibility. Once complete, it will be available as an Aras package — and AI integration via Innovator Edge is firmly in our sights.

Since Innovator Edge itself is still in active development, we plan to stay closely aligned with Aras, incorporating the capabilities DTM needs and deepening our integration as the platform matures.

Looking Ahead

About a year has passed since ACE2025 in Boston. In that time, AI has become far more woven into daily work — including our own — and the speed of that change is hard to overstate.

AI is becoming a true co-pilot, supporting how we work and shifting us toward a model where delegating to AI is just part of the flow. We're committed to bringing that same thinking to DTM — using AI to help users work smarter and get more done.

On a lighter note: each morning during the conference, we made use of the parks near the Hilton Miami Downtown for an early run. The area was full of dog owners and well-maintained dog parks — a small but memorable detail of Miami life.

It was also a genuine pleasure to reconnect in person with our CEO from Korea after some time apart. The sunny Miami setting made the whole trip that much more worthwhile.

Thank you for exploring our latest updates. We’re committed to continually improving and look forward to sharing more with you soon. For any inquiries, please contact us at dtm_support@zionex.com.

ーDTM Team