The Invisible Engine of Innovation

AI, robotics, advanced manufacturing, and other emerging technologies are converging. Learn how ASTM’s Critical and Emerging Technologies Division is bringing experts together to close standards gaps and help move innovation into real-world use.

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Presented by ASTM International

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Dave Walsh (00:12):

Here in 2026, technology develops rapidly, to say the least. AI, robotics, advanced manufacturing, they're all advancing at a ferocious pace with major developments in the news cycle seemingly every day. So how can standards keep up? Today's guest is taking on the challenge, leading the formation of ASTM's critical and emerging technologies division, a new initiative aimed at bridging the standards gap. I'm your host, Dave Walsh, editor-in-chief of Standardization News. And today I talk with Mohsen Seifi, ASTM's Vice President, Global Advanced Manufacturing and CET Division. He joined ASTM in 2018 and has over 15 years of experience managing and prioritizing research and business programs. 

So, Mohsen, almost every conversation about technology right now is about AI, and I'm talking about pop culture, the news, everywhere you look. But in this field, every conversation about technology competition is about AI. You've mentioned and you've argued that AI alone is not enough. So what are most people missing in this case?

Mohsen Seifi (01:13):

I came into this from the manufacturing side, so I tend to look at what has to physically exist before any of it works. And here's what I keep seeing now, Dave. A robot that was three printed, running on an AI brain with a quantum chip on it. That is not a forecast. Somebody's building that machine right now. So when people tell me AI is going to change everything, I agree with them. I just think they are looking at one layer of it. AI does not act on the world by itself. It acts through something. It acts through a machine, through a part, through a material, and that machine has to be manufactured. That part has to be qualified. And the whole thing runs on semiconductors and on, and on energy. So let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean. Think about a drone, an unmanned aircraft system that is additively manufactured with advanced microelectronics embedded right into this structure.

(02:20):

Or think about a humanoid robot with AI capability built into it. In both of these cases, you are not looking at one technology. You're looking at four or five of them stacked together, and every single one of them has to work. And they have to work with each other. And that's really the shift. You do not find these technologies standing alone anymore. They work hand in hand and really next to each other. Now, 10 years ago, I could sit here and talk to you about additive manufacturing as its own field. And that will be a complete conversation. Today, I cannot, because the interesting problems are all of the points where additive meets AI or where robotics meets autonomy or where any of it meets microelectronics. And, uh, there's a second thing people miss, and this one is about AI itself rather than about the stack.

(03:24):

Okay. When you use AI in anything safety critical, the risk is not that it gets things wrong loudly. That will be easy to catch. The risk is what it, I would call silent success. The output can, uh, look completely correct while the reasoning behind it cannot be validated. And in our word, an answer you cannot really interrogate is not the evidence. So the way I say it to my own team is this. The qualified part is a promise. AI changes how fast and how well we earn that promise. Essentially, AI does not change that. The promise has to be earned, right? So what are people missing? Back to again, the question, I think people are watching the top of the stack and the race is really the whole stack. You're only paying attention to the models and the algorithms. You are watching a fraction of what actually determines who leads in this.

(04:27):

In a nutshell, AI does not build anything by itself. Everything it touches in the physical world still has to be made, tested, and trusted before really anybody can use it. And that's the layer people often are missing.

Dave Walsh (04:45):

So this is the Standards Impact Podcast. So we have to get back to the topic of standards eventually. And so everything that you've just said makes a lot of sense, but what does it mean for standards? What gaps open up when you have technologies, like you mentioned, additive manufacturing converging with AI in this way? What are the implications?

Mohsen Seifi (05:05):

It really puts the standards right in the middle of it. And it changes what a standards gap even looks like. For most of the history of this work, a gap sat inside one technology. You would find there was no test method for a particular material or no specification for a particular process. And you would go and build it. It was contained. One committee owned it and one community of experts knew the answer. That is not where the gaps are anymore. Now they sit between technology. And the honest problem is that nobody owns this space between two committees, right? Every committee within ASTM standardization ecosystem is deep and excellent in its own area. And the question falls in the middle of it. I can give you an example I know best because this is the problem I spend years of my life on. Qualifying a part used to be materials and process questions.

(06:07):

You want to know how the material behave, how the process behaved, and whether the part would perform in service. Today, that same part might be printed, then inspected by a machine learning system, then handled by an autonomous system on the floor. The qualification now requires a holistic viewpoint across several technology areas at once. And if you only answer the additive question, you have not actually qualified anything. And I want to make this concrete because I think it is not an abstract, again, for anybody building these systems. If you're running one of these programs today, you're already paying for this, and we can put a number on it. According to one of the recent examples, the Air Force Research Lab indicated that qualifying these systems can cost often one and a half million dollars and takes over 18 months to qualify just a single material and a machine combination.

(07:09):

It is really un- unsustainable. And this is, again, our, our words and characterization. And our own survey data through our yearly roles report says the same thing from the other direction. More than 60% of end users name material selection and qualification as the biggest barrier to adoption. And what I find more interesting is that it stays on the list. They get more experienced. This is not really a beginner problem that Experian solves. So the honest summary is that we're stuck between what we can build and what we can trust. The designs exist, the machines are more capable than they have ne - ever been. And the thing sitting between all of that and actual deployment is a qualification. Standardization has to happen the way technology happens, hand in hand with multidisciplinary people sitting at the same table rather than each group solving its own piece and hoping the pieces fit together at the end.

(08:14):

So technology is converging. To lead it, we have to converge too. All

Dave Walsh (08:18):

Right. So this has been great background. We kind of talked about the technologies that are at play and the, even a bit about the standards process. But we are also here to talk about a specific initiative on the part of ASTM, which is the creation of the critical and emerging technologies division. And so maybe this is your chance. If you could just let us know what is it, what led to its creation, and what does it do that a technical committee does not? Because many might think just create another committee.

Mohsen Seifi (08:47):

Yeah. The simplest way to say it is that the, the name really just caught up with the work that we have been doing for over the past several years. We're not coming to this brand new. In 2018, we built the Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence, and we built it for a specific reason. We had learned that the gaps in a standardization obviously do not close by themselves. Somebody has to go and do the research that fills them and then carry those results into the committees. So we created a mechanism to do exactly that. And it worked. More than 40 of the standards that, uh, 42 is today, um, came out of the, that work and result from the research that, uh, we have been working on. And it's still some of them are still being developed. And I want to be precise about who did what there, because it matters.

(09:40):

The, the research came from that program. The standards themselves were written, debated, and balloted by the members within the committee. That's their work. What we did was remove the reason they could not get us started. So once it was working, something happened that I did not expect. Other committees started within ASTM coming to us. They would say, "Look, you have built an entire ecosystem around this topic. And you have research, you have standards, you have training and certification. You have market intelligence. You have an advisory services. You have a conference attached to this. Why can we not use that for our technology area or the committees that we are running?" So we took that question to our board in 2019 and we provided really a wider strategy. And in 2022, we established a global advanced manufacturing division. And we widened the scope beyond additive to robotics and autonomous systems, because that is really the other physical infrastructure that everything else runs on.

(10:48):

And in 2024, NIST, a National Institute for Standards Technology, released a funding opportunity to establish a center of excellence for standardization in critical emerging technologies. I remember sitting in that webinar that NIST was running to describe the call, and it described what we had already been doing for years. It was essentially our playbook. So we responded. We competed against multiple institutions and we won that competition. That became ASCET in 2025, January. Which is why I say the name caught up with the work. This division has been operating across multiple critical emerging technologies for several years. The name is the last thing to move, not the first. Now, we asked how this is different from a technique committee. And that is an important question. A committee goes deep in one technology. And that depth is, it's a strength. Standards are developed there by the members through consensus.

(11:52):

That does not change. The division does not do that work. What this division does is run three phases around it. Before standardization, we identify the gaps early and move fast to close them through roadmaps, research, convening, and things of that nature. The standardization itself happens where it always has in the committees. And that phase is about collaboration, rules, and global reach. And then after the standard exists, we turn it into action through training and certification so that people build real capacity and confidence using it. And on top of that, the division works is spaced between committees that no single committee owns. For a committee member listening to this, I want to be very concrete about what it means for you. It means research arriving at your committee. It means resources. It means new participants who would not otherwise have found their way to you. And there's a real resources funding behind it.

(12:57):

Across the division, we have secured more than $30 million in government funding to date, and it goes into exactly these things. Closing the standardization gaps, building training and certification, providing market intelligence, advisory work with the industry agencies, whatnot. So it is not a new organization sitting on top of the committees. It is the same engine we built in advanced manufacturing, which is, is still our flagship, uh, now running across technologies that are converging with each other.

Dave Walsh (13:31):

You touched on the ASCET Center of Excellence, which I certainly wanted to make sure we talked about here as it's one of the, the big achievements of the new division. And that acronym stands for Advancing Standardization for Critical and Emerging Technologies. And as you also mentioned, it does operate under a NIST cooperative agreement. So maybe you could tell our listeners, what is some of the specific work that has been done to this point by ASCET? And what are some of the critical and emerging technology areas that the center's working on, maybe right now and planned for the future?

Mohsen Seifi (14:01):

The honest description of it is that it is not an ASTM program. It is a national center and initiative that ASTM operates under a cooperative agreement with NIST. And it only works because the other organizations agreed to be part of it. NIST created the opportunity and set the priorities. It covers four areas, artificial intelligence, quantum, semiconductors, and microelectronics and biotechnology. It may cover other technology areas in the future. We don't know that. Really, the first job was not to write anything. It was to find out what actually exists. So we published four comprehensive environmental scans. One for each area. Mapping where standardization stands today and where the cross-cutting opportunities are. And obviously, you cannot close a gap you have not located. But what ASID really is underneath all of that is a platform. We work alongside NIST, alongside ANSI, alongside the other standards and industry organizations.

(15:12):

And I want to be, again, careful how I say this because none of us could do this alone and none of us is trying to run it alone. What I'm most proud of is not that we're operating. It is that organizations which do not always naturally sit at the same table, agree to sit at this one. Around that we built an advisory board representing these technology areas. We have run a series of workshops and we're building an information and data sharing hub. So there is one place to go to access resources and get involved in CE2 standardization and ecosystem. There's also a workforce mission, and that one obviously matters personally to me. These technologies are really moving faster than the current standards community can absorb on its own. And we need new people, new blood coming in. We need them trained, not just complying with the standards, but genuinely proficient in using them and, uh, leading the standards development as well.

(16:15):

And there is a pre-standardization pilot program where we test the frameworks quickly before anything becomes a full standard. And those are the, some of the other activities. Now, one thing I also wanted to share, uh, because people often ask us, we choose the name ASCET deliberately because it echoes the word ASCET. That is what we want the center to be, a national ASCET that produces economic benefit and technological leadership for a long time, not a program that runs for a few years and closes. Our annual convening is going to be executed very soon, and I would encourage obviously anybody following the news on that when it comes out. And the achievement here is, again, not the documents that we publish. It is the organizations which normally operate separately, and in some cases compete, are now on one table on this, and they work together as an ecosystem.

(17:16):

That is really what ASCET is for. Bringing the industries, the standard bodies, government together to move the CET standardization forward and maintain the leadership in the field.

Dave Walsh (17:30):

Well, one of the things ASTM is known for is collaboration and working with partners to get things done more efficiently. It's one of the things it prides itself on actually. And I know you have created many of these partnerships, worked with many other organizations to collaborate. So I wanted to ask, who are some of the partners you're currently working with across the division and through ASCET, including maybe some that you wouldn't traditionally be in a standards room with? And how do you envision it expanding possibly in the future to take on more partners and collaborate further?

Mohsen Seifi (18:01):

Yeah. So let's think back to the early additive years. I mean, regulators were largely absent in the early days. The technology providers would not share with each other. It was a small room and a guarded one. I'm talking about 15, 18 years ago. Today, we have full participation across government, industry, academia, and the national labs. And the difference in what we can produce is obviously enormous. So through ASCET, we're now working alongside NIST and ANSI and other US standard bodies, which is a different kind of partnership than we have had before. Internationally, more than 40 of our advanced manufacturing standards were developed obviously jointly with ISO through TC261. And numerous organizations globally were involved in that. Again, that is not us publishing and hoping the world adopts it. That is building it together from the start. And then there is the latest committee ASTM created Comedy F50 on AI for manufacturing systems.

(19:15):

And that committee essentially think it's a clearer signal of all. It launched publicly recently in June, and it drew over 100 organizations from close to 20 countries, uh, with five subcommittees already standing. Nobody had to go to recruit that. That is really demand showing up on its own. So a good share of those partnerships and participants are people who have never sat in a standards committee in their lives. Software developers, AI developers, robotic teams. And that is exactly who we need because they know where the technology actually breaks. So I would say every sector brings a piece that the others cannot. Government brings policy, convening power, and the signal of urgency. Industry brings the real use cases and the market reality so that we're solving problems that actually exist. Academia pushes the boundary of what is possible and produces the future of workforce and standards bodies.

(20:24):

Turn innovation into infrastructure, which is what builds the trust that really unlocks the markets. We're one of the most collaborative organizations in this space, and that is this history of ASTM. And again, we do not need to own all of it. We need it to exist. Where somebody else is better placed to lead a piece of this, we'll work with them. We embrace collaboration and partnership.

Dave Walsh (20:53):

So as you're talking, I'm kind of thinking about these partners and all the stakeholders involved and how you gather their input and, and get them together so they all have a say. And it reminds me that standards have a reputation for not being fast. Standards development is something of a slow process. So these technologies, you know, they move in months rather than days and hours. How do you engage early enough to matter without standardizing something before it's ready?

Mohsen Seifi (21:21):

Yeah, that's a very good question. People think standards are boring. Think about the cable you charge your phone with, right? Um, there used to be a drawer in every house full of plugs that did not fit anything. And now there is one connector. That was the standards, right? Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI, the outlet in your wall. Standards are really the invisible engine of innovation. And most of the time, you only notice them when they are missing. There is a study that, uh, was conducted recently by a bunch of colleagues and prepared in the ANSI context. They linked, uh, academic publications and found more than close to 10,000 standards documents and patent citations across the United States, European and international patent systems. So this is not a survey of opinions. Uh, it is what inventors actually cited when they filed. So close to 10,000 standards documents. According to that study, ASTM produces about 11% of the standards in that database.

(22:36):

They account for about 20% of the patent citations and about 21% of the US ones. So our standards are cited close to twice as often as our share of the database would predict. And in advanced manufacturing specifically, ASTM leads every standards body in patent citations. The single most cite, cite to the standard in advanced manufacturing is ASTM D638. It is a tensile test method. I found that satisfying because that is exactly the kind of work that we've been helping and supporting. Uh, it tells you something real. Inventors are building on test methods. They need a way to compare materials and validate properties. And standards gives them that, right? There's one other finding in that study worth mentioning. The standards most linked to follow on invention come from international consensus-based nonprofit bodies. Not from governments, not from single companies. The open model is the one that produces invention downstream.

(23:49):

So patents cite standards. That is really the whole answer. If a standards constrained innovation, inventors would not be building on top of it.

Dave Walsh (24:01):

You just got into the standardization process and standards development. But I'm thinking that ASTM being an international organization, and so much of this work is developed with partners around the world who we've been discussing here today. How does all of that shape the approach you take? Especially, uh, I'm thinking when different governments define critical and emerging technologies differently, when you've got not just people with different perspectives and point of views, but people with different definitions fundamentally.

Mohsen Seifi (24:29):

There are roughly 40 governments publishing their own critical emerging technologies lists. And those lists do not necessarily agree with each other. They also keep changing sometimes annually. So we did very strong research on that to really understand where different governments are coming from. 'Cause ASTM obviously being an international body, we wanted to come up with a holistic approach. Now, what's interesting, the technologies themselves do not change based on what a government decides to call them. A qualification problem is a qualification problem, whether it appears in somebody's list or not. So we define this work and our division activities by where our standards are needed. Not by how any one government classifies it. ASPI is an organization, one of the think tanks, tracks 74 critical technologies. And according to their recent studies, China now leads high impact research in 66 of them. The United States leads in eight.

(25:38):

That is a result of long horizon research investment sustained over 20 years. So the answer to that is not to protest it. The answer is to show up and lead, and you lead in the standards by participating in them. Pra- practically, our team sits on four continents and across more than 12 time zones with active cooperation in close to 30 countries. We are where the industries are within this division, and that is on purpose. We cannot understand the market from a distance. And we build with the international system rather than around it. As I mentioned earlier, we have a deep collaboration with ISO in the advanced manufacturing, and we're not trying to create a parallel structure. This matters commercially, not just strategically. Standards are how you get to global trade. If every country builds its own, you get fragmentation. And industry ends up paying for the same thing twice.

(26:43):

So technology does not respect borders, and neither should these standards that make it usable.

Dave Walsh (26:51):

So the field of advanced manufacturing is where this model was proven and one of the first centers of excellence created by ASTM. So maybe you could tell us that story. What did it take and what did it actually produce?

Mohsen Seifi (27:05):

Yeah. And back in 2011 and 12, I was part of a team at Cape Western Reserve University. And that team was part of a proposal that became National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute run by NCDMM, which is now America Max. I was doing research on qualifying metal additive parts. And what we found was that the barrier was not really the technology. Technology is moving very fast, evolving quickly. The barrier was that the standards did not exist. In 2013, we ran one of the first five American Max Funder projects. It was an on rapid qualification methodologies for metal additive. And in the course of that work, we found something uncomfortable, which is that the field was measuring the wrong thing or didn't have really the best way to measure things that matters the most. Almost all the attention at the time was on static properties, simple tests, and basically interrogation of the parts.

(28:13):

And how strong is it when you pull on it, right? But the actual risk on these materials was on fatigue and fractured critical behavior. And there was very little research there at all at that time. So we published on that in 2015 on the mechanical behavior of additive materials and parts and looking at it historically. That paper has since been cited more than 2,000 times, which tells you how large the gap was. And here's why that mattered practically, because qualification of metal additive part is long. And is, it is expensive. If you have a standard, you can shorten it because now you have a repeatable methodology that you can follow again and again. You graduate from trial and error. That is really what really a standards buys you. So in 2015, I took a work item from that research to, uh, Comedia 42 at the time.

(29:12):

For anybody who has not been in this work, a work item is just a proposal to develop a standard. You bring it, the members take on it, they argue about it, they ballot it. And that one later became actually one of the ISO and ASTM standards. And the idea from it all came from a project that we're conducting under America mix. Now you asked what was hard. And I'll be honest with you, the, the, the hard part was not technical. Uh, the hard part was that technology providers were competing with each other and they were not willing to share data or knowledge. And without that sharing, the standardization is simply blocked. You cannot write a test method if nobody will tell you what they are seeing. No single company. Gets to industrialize a field by itself. Once that landed, the participation opened up and the standards followed.

(30:10):

And there was a moment where I knew this was going to work. I was presenting the gaps behind the standardization topic, and I looked up and almost every key regulator was in that room. In the early days, we had almost no government participation at all. So when you see regulators show up, the demand is real, because then they are the ones who have to produce guidance and requirements, and they cannot really do that without the technical basis. So the numbers tell the, really the rest of the story. In 2016, when I started with ASTM, F42 had about 600 members roughly, and something like 15 to 18 standards. Today, it is more than a thousand members, and more than 85 standards across ASTM and ISO are published, but about 60 more in progress. And I think the fairest way to judge whether the model worked is to look at what is actually out in the ward now.

(31:13):

There are more than 700,000 certified additive parts in service, cabin parts on aircraft, parts running on a national rail fleet, orthopedic implants inside people. And here's something that tells you how young this field is still is. Nobody officially counts them. There is no register at any regulator anywhere. So we've compiled that map ourselves from public sources, and now we'll keep tracking of it. Now, let me give you also the, um, honest, uh, counterweight here, because again, we do not want to oversell this. Additive is still under 1% of global manufacturing. Roughly a fifth of a percent today, right? So the growth is real, the standards are real, and the scale is very much still ahead of us. That's the real picture. And alongside these standards, we built the community, which I think matters just as much. In 2016, we ran a workshop on fracture critical properties alongside our fatigue and fracture committee.

(32:23):

That workshop became a symposium on a structural integrity in 2019. And in 2022, it became ICAM bringing dozens of committees together. This year, ICAM will bring more than a thousand people from close to 40 countries. And that is really the model. Do the research to find a gap, carry the results into the committees, build the community around it. And it obviously took us about a decade in one technology. We're, we're not going to run the same in other technology areas. We're going to be faster in other technology areas, because now we have the playbook. We know how these things work.

Dave Walsh (33:06):

Well, we're nearing the end of our time, but before we conclude, I did wanna look to the future. And I know there are big plans ahead. What should listeners expect from the CET division over the next year? And maybe you'd also like to throw in, if someone wants to be part of this work and, and join the party, what should they do?

Mohsen Seifi (33:24):

So if you wanna be looking at the future and what's happening within our division, there are a lot of exciting activities that is happening with, within our ASCET center of excellence. We will, uh, continue to publish high impact documents. Uh, we're working on some frameworks that will benefit the industry quite immensely, uh, when it comes to prioritization and measuring the readiness level of different topics and gaps. Uh, some exciting work will happen. We're also working on, again, a large convening event that will come hopefully in the, uh, next few months, and that will bring the entire ecosystem together. Our committee F50 within the body of ASTM work. We'll conduct, um, a workshop in October during the committee week. And we're building some roadmaps in data space, especially when it comes to industrial AI and, uh, when it comes to manufacturing. We wanna really precisely identify the gaps that exist between AI and physical systems.

(34:29):

And if somebody is listening and asking what they should actually do, my answer is simple. Pick a topic, join a committee, and that is the real front door, and it's open. Come to our major convening events, come to ICAM, come to an ASCET event. Uh, come to a division activity anywhere in the world. At any point in time, we're conducting something somewhere in the world. Get trained. We have lots of training programs, uh, that you can sign up for. And I would say this particularly to people working in AI, robotics, or quantum. We've never been in a standards room. You're exactly who this needs. You know where the technology breaks, and that knowledge is currently not necessarily in these rooms. Everyone is welcome here, and honestly, everyone is needed. Every sector, every discipline, every generation in these critical emerging technologies, we invite them openly. And the future is not going to really wait for us.

(35:33):

These technologies work hand in hand now. So these standards have to be built hand-in-hand too. That is really the whole idea behind ASTM's critical emerging technologies division. If we do this well, these technologies get industrialized safely, securely, and quietly, with high quality. And governments embrace them. Industry use them. If we do not, the vacuum does not stay empty. The rules get written somewhere else. They get written into proprietary specifications that lock markets or into another country's standards that quietly become the global default. And if we do not lead in standards, we follow somebody else's playbook. So ASTM has been doing this work for about 128 years now. The organization has enabled a lot of industries in that time. The task now is simply to keep the pace, because the technology's moving faster than it ever has. We proved this model in advanced manufacturing. What is new is that we're running it across technologies that are converging with each other.

(36:52):

That is what the critical emerging technology division is at ASTM.

Dave Walsh (36:58):

Well, this has been a great discussion, and I think it's been an important discussion. So we really thank you for being here with us today, Mosen, and helping to explain this whole process to us.

Mohsen Seifi (37:07):

Thank you for having me, Dave. It was a privilege to talk to you.

Dave Walsh (37:13):

If you wanna learn more about any of the standards discussed in this episode, visit astm.org for all the latest. And if you enjoyed the show, remember to like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. I'm Dave Walsh, and this has been Standards Impact, presented by ASTM International.