And now our CEO and chair, Mr. Mark Benioff.
All right. All right. Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. How are you all doing? Good. Are you enjoying Dreamforce? All right. Please welcome Roland Busch from Siemens. Welcome.
All right. We're so happy to have Roland here. Roland and I have been friends for years. And we were just talking backstage because of course he's been to San Francisco many times. He spends a lot of time in San Francisco. He's even been
Been to the tower many times. I was just at his headquarters with him in Munich as well. But he's never been to Dreamforce before. So, I'm so excited that you are here. Makes a huge difference to us. We're so grateful to you. Siemens is obviously an extraordinary company and you are an extraordinary leader. So, I'm so happy to have this conversation with you so that people here can start to get to know you. We have so many people here in the audience and then we have a huge group of people online who are also watching us as well. So Roland, I think we should just take it from the top and just have this kind of conversation. But I think a lot of people maybe they know Siemens because they went through, they were in a CT scanner and they saw the logo up above or maybe they saw some industrial equipment, you know, at a power station. But maybe they don't understand all aspects of the company, how big it is, the scale, what you do, the legacy of the company. Do you want to just give us that kind of orientation to Siemens?
I'll do that. I'll 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 by 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 and in the next years to come. Why? Because it's 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 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 of Varian, 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. 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 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 a short version, 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 we call smart infrastructure. It's about buildings. I mean you 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, commuter trains, 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 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 an 80, 85 billion company including health. We still consolidate. We have 320,000 people worldwide, 85,000 in Germany, 40,000 to 45,000 United States, 30,000 in China, India, and we are present in more than 100 countries in the world.
I mean it's an inspiring story and Siemens is amazing, just the continuum of the story and the level of transformations. We've talked about this so many times, but now you've been the leader now of the company for quite some time now and you took on the incredible lineage after, you know, Joe Kaeser. And so give us a vision of, you know, you see this incredible change happening. You've been living it. You've been driving it in many cases, especially when we get to AI in the enterprise. Well, in our last conversations, when we were in Munich only a few weeks ago, we really were talking about how the deterministic layer and the non-deterministic layer are coming together for the first time. You saw how I brought our conversation right into the keynote as well. You know, give us your vision of what's happening in the enterprise and what are the changes that we're going to see, because I think you maybe more than any other customer have a truly unique and insightful idea what is very specifically going to happen.
So my communication team they really got to my nerves and telling me, Roland, tell me your strategy. And I said, well, I was telling the strategy, and they 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 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 a 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 know-how. 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 are accelerating with AI, we're 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 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 dollars, 30% of it, if you increase productivity by 10, 20%, you know what's at stake and how much you can win. And the 10, 20% is possible if you really go for a real industrial AI world.
You kind of skirted by part of my question, which was a little bit about how things have changed now that, you know, you've, how long have you been the CEO for? It's not 10 years, is it?
So five years and I'm in my year number six now.
So it's not quite 10 years.
So in that period of time, just tell us how have things changed? I mean we've gone through COVID, we've...
Went through all these diseases.
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 of, 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 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 we are serving customers first and foremost. Number two, a tech company, because we are really, and this is Siemens DNA. I mean we have always 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 org 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 did run it in four business units, now it's one, it's a CRM layer, you like that, 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. And the last point is really getting AI technology all into what we do, in the way how we control 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, develop your local Chinese products and sell them, scale them as fast as possible, as we do for the United States. So 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 the United States, in Seattle. We are ramping up as we speak. These guys are doing an amazing job in really 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, our simulation software. We spent five billion on Dotmatics, which is about coming from the design of products to design of molecules, which is a big thing, life science. So it's fun.
When you talk about that cultural change that you've had to go through, because it's a radically different company already in just six years, right? It's amazing the shift that you've made. What have been the hardest parts of the cultural change?
