With engineering and production software, the story was always the same: not enough skilled people. But it's becoming clear, and will become clearer still, that the tools had a hand in it too.
Not because software was ever dumb. To most of us, it was mute.
For decades it only talked to people who spoke its language.
Software was never dumb. To most of us, it was mute.
Then Siri and Google Assistant showed up. Their small talk was more fancy than useful. Until generative AI arrived. A polyglot that talks to computers and to people at the same time. And that opens up new dimensions in manufacturing too.
The first digital co-worker fluent in both languages: machine and human.
In its first maintenance pilots, Siemens' copilot cut reactive maintenance time by 25% on average. Cedrik Neike from Siemens' managing board: "In the past, we had to speak to machines in their language. With the Siemens Industrial Copilot, we can speak to machines in our language."
The first digital co-worker fluent in both languages: machine and human.
And that's the leap. For fifty years, we humans learned the language of machines. Only a few of us really made it. Now an interface has come along that has learned human languages and the language of machines.
At Siemens' electronics plant in Erlangen, AI explains machine error codes to operators on the soldering lines in plain language and suggests a fix.
At Schaeffler, it takes engineers' instructions and writes the PLC code that runs the machines. At AMD, it talks to SAP and helps untangle supply chain problems. At Kaeser and Reinhausen, it digs through databases and helps put quotes together …
But AI isn't coming into factories to replace people, the way it is elsewhere. It won't be allowed to fly on autopilot here. As a polyglot, though, it will become the co-pilot no factory will soon be able to imagine working without.