From Italy to Milwaukee: How ITER IDEA Is Bringing AI Resource Planning to the Midwest

Column by Guido Mazza, Co-founder, ITER IDEA

During my work over the past 12 years, I’ve helped manufacturing firms improve ERP efficiency. That’s why I co-founded ITER IDEA, bootstrapped it, and through that experience saw a consistent challenge: resource planning was still slow, manual and full of spreadsheets. From hospitals to public sector offices and factories, teams were spending hours, sometimes entire days, figuring out how to allocate people, machines, and shifts efficiently. I realized there was an opportunity to build a solution that could handle this complexity reliably and at scale.

That’s how ITER IDEA was born. Our platform, AIRP – AI Resource Planner , takes the complexity of workforce management and turns it into a matter of seconds. With custom rules and constraints, AIRP can model hundreds of employees, dozens of machines, and dozens of operational constraints to find the optimal schedule almost instantly. The impact is real: in pilot projects across AgTech, manufacturing, healthcare, and public service, AIRP has saved teams the equivalent of two full-time employees and $20-30k per month. For one client, it reduced a four-hour scheduling task to five seconds while unlocking new insights and control capabilities standard systems couldn’t provide. With the integration of generative models, the goal now is to potentially automate operations regarding the complexity and the existing ERP/MES at the facilities. At the start of 2026 we’ve seen a boost in companies asking how to adopt our platform to customize their own algorithms and workflows.

We’ve had success in Europe and the UK, even becoming a supplier for the Scottish Government. Expanding into the U.S. presented a new opportunity. Specifically, the Midwest because it’s home to thousands of manufacturers, freight companies, and healthcare providers, the exact industries that can benefit from AI-powered workforce planning. Wisconsin, and Milwaukee in particular, has a connected ecosystem of small and medium-sized enterprises that made it the perfect starting point. In Wisconsin, there are many networking opportunities that lead to real partnerships, and curiosity quickly turns into collaboration.

Since moving to Wisconsin, the support has been tremendous. Programs like WCTC’s AI Applied Lab and partnerships with gener8tor have allowed us to showcase real use cases and help companies see the value of AI in workforce efficiency. In just two months, we’ve begun engaging dozens of local companies, and the response has been incredibly encouraging.

Our vision for the next year is focused: raise capital, hire a dedicated sales engineer, and continue building relationships across the Midwest. While our team remains mostly remote—with colleagues in the UK, Spain, and Italy—I’m fully based in Wisconsin to lead our U.S. launch. The goal is to establish AIRP as the go-to AI resource planning solution for industries where scheduling and workforce management remain manual, slow, and costly. AIRP is helping organizations reclaim hours, reduce costs, and make better decisions. Wisconsin’s collaborative business community and strong industrial base is the ideal place to bring this vision to life.