Siemens held a press conference at Mandalay Bay and has constructed a mini-Siemens City at the Las Vegas Convention Center, where CES 2024 is mostly held. (It seems the vast event covers the entire Strip.) This year, CTO and Paul-Newman lookalike Peter Koerte opened to applause. I must say CES draws an extremely well-behaved and polite audience. The crowd at CAD events tends to have more of a “show me” attitude. Koerte does not disappoint. He is polished, poised and relatable. I had to wonder if he was a real CTO. Actually, he is more than a CTO. He is also a member of Siemens’ board of directors and their chief strategy officer.
Siemens, in keeping with all others at CES and the last year of conferences, led with a discussion of AI. Their spin on AI, however, was that Siemens alone had industrial AI.
Large language models like ChatGPT learn on text data, and they are, surprisingly enough, running out of data, says Koerte. Meanwhile, industry has a never-ending supply of data. So much data is streaming from sensors from manufacturing operations, IoT devices, monitoring equipment and the like.
Now, imagine being able to combine natural language prompts with industrial AI to diagnose problems. “Why is this robot missing every 5th weld?” for example.
Koerte explained what Siemens, a global manufacturer, was doing at CES, a show normally associated with the gadgets. Siemens was basically the wizard behind the curtain, Koerte explained. All of the CES 2025 keynote companies are either designed with Siemens software or are partners of Siemens. All the auto manufacturers, many of whom were displaying their latest technology at CES, use Siemens products. So did many of the consumer product companies, some of whom have a bigger footprint at the show, such as Sony, LG and Samsung.
Koerte made additional announcements. (See full announcement.)
1. JetZero will be using Siemens applications. The innovative blended-wing commercial jet is sure to get Siemens some attention. JetZero’s CEO, Tom O’Leary joined Koerte on stage to thank Siemens for creating a platform that will help JetZero be the first all-digital aircraft. While Boeing 777 was the first aircraft to be designed completely with CAD (CATIA), JetZero’s aircraft will be designed, manufactured and maintained using the Siemens Xcelerator platform.
JetZero’s name suggests Net Zero and the aircraft gets halfway there, reducing carbon emissions by 50%.
2. Siemens for Startups. Siemens will offer 90% discounts on software to startups in their first year, 80% in the second year and 70% in the third year.
3. The Sony XR head-mounted display. Apple may have lost interest in XR, stopping production on its XR, headset but Siemens thinks an XR headset, if made right, would be great for immersive viewing. “Your used to have to do this with CAVEs,” says Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens Digital Industries.
4. NVIDIA collaboration. The Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer will be powered by NVIDIA’s Omniverse technology.
5. Designcenter. Hemmelgarn joined Koerte onstage to announce the Designcenter suite, which will include Solid Edge and NX. Both will use one data file format. Could this be the happy ending to the Solid Edge story, with the parent Siemens finally adopting Solid Edge, which it once kept under the stairs, and telling its favorite child, NX, to play nice?
Siemens, by being a big presence at CES, while its competitors in design software, stayed home, is establishing itself as a technology leader. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA and today’s tech darling said Siemens had become the operating system of the industry.
