Engineers make dozens of decisions a day, and most of the information they need doesn't live in the design model: Is this part in stock? What's the lead time? Has this assembly been quoted? Today, that means logging into three or four systems by hand.
To close that gap, COOLORANGE built the powerGate ERP Connector for AI, now available on the Design and Make Marketplace. This MCP server gives AI clients a standard way to discover and use trusted business capabilities, connecting design data with enterprise systems. An assistant can now check inventory, review lead times, and with approval, update a bill of materials or kick off a purchasing request.
When I sat down with Christian Gessner, co-founder and head of research and innovation at COOLORANGE, he pointed to a bigger shift in how engineers will work with AI going forward. "The engineer simply expresses the goal," he told me. "That's where agentic AI becomes transformative. Not because it replaces engineers, but because it removes the friction between all the different systems an engineer already uses today. Our role is to ensure those business systems become trusted participants in that conversation with AI."
COOLORANGE is an APS certified partner and has spent over 15 years connecting Autodesk products to the systems manufacturers run on. Building a new way of working for engineers with AI also means a shift in how they think about the solutions they bring to market. As Gessner put it: "We are no longer building only applications. We are building reliable capabilities that intelligent agents can discover, reason about, combine, and execute toward an outcome.”
A marketplace built on trust
COOLORANGE has published the powerGate Connector for AI on the Design and Make Marketplace, where every solution is vetted for quality by Autodesk.
When I asked what publishing on the marketplace unlocks, Gessner went straight to trust. "The marketplace creates something very essential: trust," he said. "Customers need to know where a capability comes from, what it can access, who stands behind it. Autodesk provides a consistent platform where partners can contribute specialized domain knowledge, and customers can adopt those capabilities with greater confidence."
MCP servers and applications published on the Design and Make Marketplace will become available within Autodesk Assistant in the future, and COOLORANGE built the powerGate ERP Connector for AI to work for that experience. Gessner sees this as the next unlock for the industry: connecting capabilities directly to the intent an engineer describes, where they can simply ask Autodesk Assistant to check stock, confirm a lead time, and place the order without leaving the flow of design to get an answer.
We invite developers and builders innovating in AEC, Manufacturing, and Media & Entertainment to submit your solutions for publishing on the Design and Make Marketplace.