A Conversation with Roland Busch and Marc Benioff | Dreamforce 2026

I do that. I give you a rundown of a company heading for 180 years in maybe two or three minutes. So that's a challenge. And the best thing is if I start in sharing with you what we do not do. We don't do mobile phones anymore. We don't do communication network stuff anymore. By the way, we don't do washing machines and stuff like that anymore. No white goods. You will find them with a Siemens brand, but it's not ours. It's Bosch. So, I mean, take that away. And why I'm saying that because this company has one constant over the last 180 years, which is transformation. We really changed our company over and over again. And actually the biggest change happens in the last couple of years in the next years to come. Why? Because it's the fastest by far the fastest change in our history. Think about it. When electricity this is the time when Siemens was built when electricity changed the whole world. It took 30 years for electricity to really penetrate society. Now AI takes 7 to 8. So this is the speed with which we are talking about. So what is Siemens about? You will find three Siemens companies. All of three of them are listed on the German stock market. Let me start with Siemens Energy. This is a company which is doing gas turbines, steam turbines, high voltage equipment, grids. And that's a company which is listed and we just sold 5% we let finally go. Then you find Siemens Healthineers. CT scanner, MR scanner, blood diagnostics, ultrasound and the like. Including particle therapy. So it's an acquisition variant by the way sitting in the Bay Area. This is a company we will still hold 67% but we announced that we will spin off or sell off another roughly 30% beginning of next year. They call it's called Siemens Healthineers. And then you have Siemens. This is I would say the real thing which is the company I'm responsible for and we actually we have three businesses. One is we call digital industries. We are actually automating each and every manufacturing discrete process hybrid in the world. We are the largest automation company in the world if it comes to that. So the automation business is one and the other one is our digital software business which is the largest industrial software business in the world. If you want short version is if you want to build a digital twin of your product of your manufacturing line whatever which behaves like the real thing come to Siemens you will get a digital twin which does it. The next business is what called smart infrastructure is about buildings. I mean you would find actually cannot walk one block in New York without passing by a building which is automated by building automation from Siemens. It's the whole stuff safety security, energy efficiency in buildings, building automation. And the other tools are electrification, medium voltage, low voltage electrification for everything, grids, grid operators, distribution operators, but also data centers. And the last one is Siemens Mobility, which is our train business. We do locomotives, computers, high-speed trains as well as signaling systems and the related service. And we have a very strong footprint here. Amtrak is renewing the whole fleet going electric with Siemens rolling stock. We have we are the market leader in signaling business. We are innovating. We bring signaling systems to the cloud. So you can control a whole signaling system of Germany for example out of the cloud. These are the potentials which we have in numbers. Siemens is a 80 85 billion company including health. We still consolidate. We have 320,000 people worldwide, 85,000 in Germany, 40,000 45,000 United States, 30,000 in China, India and we are present in more than 100 countries in the world.

So my communication team they really got to my nerves and telling Roland tell me your strategy and I and I said well I was telling the strategy and I said no no no make it in short words bring it in one sentence I said yeah okay so here is the try Siemens is combining the real and the digital world in the age of AI. Sounds simple but here's a lot of truth in it because what we are talking about now is industrial AI. So this is when AI really hits the real world in the way how you design a product, how you manufacture, how you operate your assets. And that sounds simple but it's super complicated because we are living in a world where failure is not an option. You cannot launch a design of a car or a product, manufacture it, send it to the field and find out it doesn't work. This is not an option. It costs you so so much money. So each step from design to production again to operation has to be deterministic has to fulfill security requirements to the highest standard. And think about it when you ask AI a question today the same question you get different answers. So you need this is not an option. You need an harness. You need to make that work in the real world. And this is again it sounds simple but it's extremely hard to do that. You need domain knowhow. You need a lot of data and you need to have kind of embedded harnesses which make sure that your models don't go off-road. I give you one example when you for example people are saying you can now easily as you upload all your product designs whatever product you have and ask AI give me a new version you will get one but eventually it will not work. So what you do need is you need a kind of a system behind which brings me to one of our products Teamcenter which holds all the data. It has a contextualization of the data ontologies which means which links the components of your product to each other with a certain semantic behind so we make sure that it works and then we have simulation tools which we obviously we are accelerating with AI we enriching with AI but at the end of the day a physics-based simulation gives you always the boundaries it works in the real world or it doesn't so you have this loop of auto harness so to speak. So and so the idea behind it is that we will bring in the AI to the real world. And this is where I believe the monetization will take place. You can write a new song with AI but and you can monetize so much but if you really want to get a lot of improvement and return then you have to go to the real world. Give you an idea 30% of the global GDP is manufacturing related so let's say 100 trillion dollar 30% of it if you increase productivity by 10 20% you know what's on stake in how much you can win and the 10 20% is possible if you really go for a real industrial AI world.

I'm in my sixth. Yeah.

In my six years.

So I'm so five years and I'm in my year number six now.

It's not quite 10 years.

Well the biggest change happened my predecessor had a strategy for Siemens was in a word was fleet of ships. So you have business units and segments below. We had 15 business units, another 20 segments and the idea was let them go as individual companies and run. And you can do that. But I believe the value of Siemens sits in our technology stack which we scale across as many verticals as you want which is ultimately what customers expect us to do and what I believe makes us different because nobody has the competence in automation electrification in digitalization like Siemens has got. This is the biggest change because if you trim an organization for being yeah everything sort I have my own little ship. I mean we ended up I see Scott Gardner who's running our sales for automation. We ended up in having I can disclose that here I guess 700 job descriptions for our automation salespeople only because each unit thought about having my own my own little this is not going to work and digitalization AI is about scale and you cannot scale if you put it into little boxes. Another aspect was digitalization or AI doesn't respect silos. You won't believe maybe you do because you have a little bit of insights how many data silos we have got. So the whole idea to say we go from a fleet of ships to one tech company one means that we are one company actually and we have businesses below but this is we are serving customers first and foremost number two a tech company because we are really and this is Siemens DNA. I mean we ever have been from the very first start. I mean it was a tech company with our founders idea in mind to really create technology which improved the world of people. So and to bring that out and make people proud for delivering technology forget your org code. I mean we are super strong in all codes. No when somebody introduces himself or herself says I'm Siemens DI SW who cares our customers don't care. They expect somebody from Siemens to solve your problems. This is more a cultural change than it is really a content change. So when I started off this was the first thing and we've changed the culture the idea how we run a company and then the next thing was each of my predecessors started with a reorganization. And I thought I saw it so many times I'm in the managing board since I don't know 12 13 years the last five six years as CEO I thought why don't we try to run this company in the same structure with a different mindset and see how fast we can go and we delivered one record year after the other but then I found out if you really want to scale if you want to reach the next level we have to make some structural changes too this is where we started off going for this one tech company we changed our automation business completely we run it in we did run it for business units now it's one it's a technology layer so technology units and then you have the manufacturing and manufacturing is also then one manufacturing footprint so to speak we optimize so we changed a lot only where we need it so in some businesses we didn't really touch too much. So and the last point is really getting AI technology all into what we do in the way how we control in our legal processes but in particular into our products and this is another big change. One more on products. We also saw that in this time of geopolitics of export controls we have to bring out more local for local products. So we get a lot of freedom to our China team to say I mean develop your local Chinese products and sell them scale them as fast as possible as we do for United States. So this is is it always our wish? Maybe not because it's great to have global products which you develop once and sell all the way but we have to do that. And the other one on AI we started off hiring and building up our AI competence center in United States in Seattle. We are ramping up as we speak. These guys are doing an amazing job in really bringing creating products which are landing so well in the market. We do that with another team a smaller one in China with local Chinese models using there so it's a lot of change and along that we spend a lot of money in M&A as well we acquired for 10 billion Altair closing our software Sweden simulation we work we spent five billion on Dotmatics so which is about coming from the design of products to design of molecules which is a big thing life science. So it's and it's fun.