Siemens Lifts Outlook For 2026, Driven By AI Demand | Siemens CEO Exclusive | Global Dialogues

So, well, this will not be that dramatic. I mean obviously you will still see manufacturing sites with labor on the shop floor, but we will also see that technology is evolving. The level of automation and digitalization is increasing. There's a massive amount of money going into robots, and they will make a change as we go forward. So in short, I would say it's not that labor is disappearing from the shop floor; it's evolving into a different way of labor which you need on the shop floor. You need more people programming robots, dealing with technology, automation technology, and the like. And there are pluses and minuses to it. Think about the United States, Germany as well. If you have countries and economies where you have real labor shortage, let alone a labor shortage of trained labor, then you obviously want to go as digital and as automated as possible in order to really run your plants less dependent on labor. It's a little bit different in India, I guess. You still have many, many people pushing into the market, which by the way you have to train as well because they have to have a certain level of knowledge to do that. AI is supporting that, is accelerating the way we automate, how we design products, how we design plants. We create the digital twins of a product, of a plant, and then we build it, and then you can come to a completely different level of automation and digitization. Also on the shop floor, you have agents which are doing the job. They are working like supervisors which can fix problems. You still need people on the shop floor if you have to exchange a gearbox or whatever. You have to do something, but it will change as we go forward. So there is a level of disruption, a certain level of disruption in it, but it's not a world where you can shut down the lights on each of your manufacturing sites.

Yeah. So to give you an idea, we invested over the last 20 years $30 billion in our software stack, in our software portfolio. And we talk about our software, which is really software that creates physics-based digital twins of products, of manufacturing sites, of any kind of infrastructure. And the first question is, would AI replace all that? And the answer is no, because this software, again physics-based, gives you always a boundary of what's possible and what's not. Hallucination is not an option in your design, it's not an option in manufacturing. So therefore, once you contain any kind of AI technology within the limits that are really super important to have to rely on the decisions you make, that's a super good combination. Yes, you can still accelerate your simulation by 10, 100-fold, thousandfold, and you make it accessible to many, many more people using AI, but you still need this combination. So therefore, this is one area which I think is super important. Now let's talk about robotics and autonomous robots which do everything. It will take a long time until you finally rely on a robot making a surgery rather than having a human. I don't know what your choice would be, but there's definitely a way to go to do that. I see two ways. One is everybody talks about humanoids. The other one talks about robots on a shop floor. They look completely different. Why would a robot on a shop floor have legs? This is complicated. It costs energy. You don't need it. If it goes into a social area, we have to have service robots doing different things. You might have it because the whole world is made for human-like people or even robots. And again, the level of autonomy if you really are serious about it, if you try any humanoids on a shop floor and let them work, it's not on that level yet. Technology will evolve, you will see a stronger and stronger way of AI impacting any kind of automation, traditional automation or robots, but at the same time, and this is what people very often underestimate, the level of quality, predictability, reliability on a shop floor when you manufacture something is so high that you really have to see how technology is evolving over time to bring it into a productive way in that space.