Siemens CEO Roland Busch says the 180-year-old industrial company is combining the real and digital worlds as AI enters manufacturing. He contrasts the 30 years electricity took to penetrate society with AI’s expected seven to eight years, calling the current transformation the fastest in Siemens’ history.

In design, production and operations, Siemens says reliability must be deterministic because defective products can create substantial costs. AI systems that give different answers to the same question and hallucinations on factory floors are therefore unsuitable without domain knowledge, substantial data and embedded safeguards to keep models from going wrong. Busch says Siemens technology automates every third manufacturing line worldwide and touches every other electron or control plane.

Siemens uses Salesforce as its customer information source across sales, maintenance, service and onboarding for 120,000 suppliers and 65,000 partners. Teamcenter serves as the source of product information, including parts and manufacturing and service instructions. Siemens connects the two systems so enterprise AI can work with industrial AI, giving sales and service representatives a virtual engineer.

Siemens has deployed Agentforce to modernize inbound sales development. The company previously received more than 2,500 unqualified leads a month without a way to identify which merited follow-up. Salesforce’s Piper agent converts prospective buyers into qualified sales opportunities: engagement and qualification agents use CRM records to personalize outreach, assess leads, gather details such as budget and timeline, and route stronger opportunities to staff.

For supplier and partner onboarding, Piper works with Marshall, Salesforce’s operations agent built on process automation technology acquired from Regrello last year. The process, which previously took days, can now take hours. Piper prepares personalized pitches and books qualified partners with human account managers; Marshall completes final onboarding steps in SAP without human intervention. Busch says AI requires companies to rethink product design, production and operations, changing interfaces and entire processes. He predicts the technology will change how customers design, manufacture and use products at unprecedented speed.

Siemens CEO Roland Busch says the 180-year-old industrial company is combining the real and digital worlds as AI enters manufacturing. He contrasts the 30 years electricity took to penetrate society with AI’s expected seven to eight years, calling the current transformation the fastest in Siemens’ history.

In design, production and operations, Siemens says reliability must be deterministic because defective products can create substantial costs. AI systems that give different answers to the same question and hallucinations on factory floors are therefore unsuitable without domain knowledge, substantial data and embedded safeguards to keep models from going wrong. Busch says Siemens technology automates every third manufacturing line worldwide and touches every other electron or control plane.

Siemens uses Salesforce as its customer information source across sales, maintenance, service and onboarding for 120,000 suppliers and 65,000 partners. Teamcenter serves as the source of product information, including parts and manufacturing and service instructions. Siemens connects the two systems so enterprise AI can work with industrial AI, giving sales and service representatives a virtual engineer.

Siemens has deployed Agentforce to modernize inbound sales development. The company previously received more than 2,500 unqualified leads a month without a way to identify which merited follow-up. Salesforce’s Piper agent converts prospective buyers into qualified sales opportunities: engagement and qualification agents use CRM records to personalize outreach, assess leads, gather details such as budget and timeline, and route stronger opportunities to staff.

For supplier and partner onboarding, Piper works with Marshall, Salesforce’s operations agent built on process automation technology acquired from Regrello last year. The process, which previously took days, can now take hours. Piper prepares personalized pitches and books qualified partners with human account managers; Marshall completes final onboarding steps in SAP without human intervention. Busch says AI requires companies to rethink product design, production and operations, changing interfaces and entire processes. He predicts the technology will change how customers design, manufacture and use products at unprecedented speed.