Member of the Managing Board, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Strategy Officer, Siemens
🔁 Fast forward to CES 2026: Industrial AI & Digital Twins with @Siemens at #CES2025 @CES #CES2026
🔁 Fast forward to CES 2026 many of the ideas discussed here with Siemens are now moving from vision to execution.
Industrial AI, photorealistic digital twins, and copilots for the workforce are no longer pilots — they’re becoming core infrastructure for how industry designs, builds, and operates. As CES 2026 approaches, the convergence of AI, simulation, and industrial-scale data — powered by ecosystems like NVIDIA Omniverse — will define the next chapter of digital industry.
CES is where these shifts surface first. CES 2026 will show how far they’ve scaled.
#CES2026 #IndustrialAI #DigitalT...
About Peter Koerte
Peter Koerte, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at Siemens, participated in a panel discussion on March 30, 2026, alongside KION CTO Rob Smith and OHB CTO Christina Wagner, focusing on industrial AI, digital twins, and data ecosystems. Koerte stated that the major difference between industrial AI and consumer-oriented large language models is the data challenge, noting that industrial data, unlike language found on the internet, is not publicly available. He argued that no single company has enough data to build the next generation of frontier models for the physical world, and that the only way forward is to build open data ecosystems through partnerships where companies exchange data while protecting intellectual property. Koerte described the partnership with KION and OHB as a way to combine domain expertise and datasets, with Siemens helping to encapsulate that knowledge in models that can be scaled universally. He expressed the belief that Europe has a global advantage in domain knowledge, and that by combining it with trusted partners to build an industrial foundation model, the region can scale it faster than others. Koerte also noted that space and aerospace companies face challenges in designing systems for flexibility and making them software-defined and AI-capable, as assets in deep space are not easily adaptable.
Transcript (14 segments)
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Host0:10
We are here at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. We have a lot of announcements from Siemens, so many that we want to talk with Peter Koerte. Peter is a member of the board of Siemens. I had the great pleasure of first meeting him in Toronto. You do a great job because you're all around the world talking about innovations and technology. So Peter, first, you want to summarize the topics that you presented today in the press conference?
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Peter Koerte0:57
The big topic here at CES this year is about AI. In our case, industrial AI, which has a lot to do with all the data of the 17 billion devices that you have out there sending data. Only 20% is used; 80% today is not accessed, and there's so much value in that data that's not being accessed today. We want to bring this to the customers, so we're going to harness that data that's not being used today, and through that we can create additional value for our customers because they need to become more competitive, more resilient, and more sustainable — all of it at the same time.
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Host1:37
And how is Siemens ensuring that AI applications remain safe, reliable, and trustworthy, especially in critical industries like energy and manufacturing?
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Peter Koerte1:50
What we do is we take the large language models that are generally available, and then we do a lot of augmentation. We do fine-tuning, we do retrieval-augmented generation where we help the AI to understand the context, and thereby we avoid hallucination. And then we test this over and over and over again to make sure that what is being generated is accurate.
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Host2:17
You talked about digital twins in the frame of sustainable aviation, and you announced a partnership with JetZero. Can you elaborate on that?
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Peter Koerte2:27
Sure. If you think about the aerospace industry and the way airplanes are being built, it hasn't fundamentally changed since the '50s. So the question is, why aren't there better designs? What JetZero is trying to do is build what is called a blended wing body — it has a very large wing with which you get better aerodynamic coefficients, and you use much less fuel as a result. They reduce fuel consumption by 50%, and that is a game changer because we know that today aviation is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, providing 3 to 4%. So that's what JetZero, as being carbon neutral, is really aiming at. In order to do so, they need a lot of technology — they need technology where they can build that airplane first in the digital world, then they need to manufacture it. And guess who is really good at designing and manufacturing? That's Siemens.
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Host3:30
When you talk about the Siemens Industrial Copilot, you mentioned the workforce challenge. There are a lot of discussions about global labor markets with the talent shortage. What does a company need to do to address these, and what is Siemens doing?
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Peter Koerte3:47
It's a major challenge. If you ask manufacturing executives in the United States — but everywhere in the world — they will tell you finding new workers but also retaining them is a big issue. The average tenure of the factory workforce has dropped from 20 years down to 3 years, and that only happened since 2019. So it's a big, big issue. They are able to capture all that knowledge in our Industrial Copilot. That knowledge is captured, and then if people start new, they can take the copilot and the copilot is telling them exactly what to do. It's a major solution for our factory customers to retain the knowledge and to speed up productivity and also the quality of work. Siemens is doing a lot about it all over the world.
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Host4:46
You mentioned partnerships. You are building an ecosystem of partners constantly, and today you talked about the partnership with Sony and Microsoft also. So what about the photorealistic digital twin and mixed reality with Sony?
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Peter Koerte5:08
If you take them together, number one is if you build a digital twin which is multi-physics — it really behaves the same way as in the real world — this is what you do in Siemens software. However, then you may want to make it look good, photorealistic. This is where the partner is NVIDIA, because NVIDIA is really good. So we built a round trip there: you can send our digital twin into NVIDIA, make it photorealistic, and then send it back. For our customers that's great to see. And then as you get it back, you may not want to look at it on the screen — you really want to have it immersive. So that's why with Sony we are providing a head-mounted display where you can have immersive engineering, where engineers can sit around and look at, for example, the airplane and manipulate it and design or optimize it. It's a game changer because it's very natural.
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Host6:03
Absolutely. And the last question is about startups — working with big companies, now also working with startups. What does the announcement about the program with startups mean?
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Peter Koerte6:19
You're right, there's definitely more potential for us to grow and to support startups — smaller companies. What they need is access to that technology, and usually this is highly priced. That's where we said, in particular for early-stage startups, we're going to provide heavy discounts: the first year we reduce it by 90%, second by 80%, third by 70%, so that they can grow and scale as they need that technology. That's what we announced today, and we're very much looking forward to working together with all the startups to help them scale.
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Host6:58
Peter, it's a pleasure to have you here today. Thank you for your time, really appreciate it.
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Peter Koerte7:03
Thank you so much, my pleasure.