CES 2026 just wrapped, and while some of you may be excited to play with LEGO SMART Bricks or turn your smartphone into a Blackberry, we’re going to focus on the Siemens keynote that revealed a deepened partnership with NVIDIA to build AI-accelerated industrial solutions.
Siemens President and CEO Roland Busch noted that AI is poised to be as transformative as electricity (something Siemens played a role in developing) once fully embedded in physical systems. He immediately addressed the trillion-dollar question of how to reliably and safely integrate AI at speed and scale. In the industrial world, where AI is being integrated into power grids, factories, transit systems, and other critical infrastructure, this means implementing an end-to-end industrial stack with digital twins, GPUs, usable data, and the necessary guardrails to prevent hallucinations. Organizations that lack this architecture will miss out on the industrial AI revolution.
Busch then introduced his “very special friend,” NVIDIA President and CEO Jensen Huang, and together they elaborated on the expansion of the Siemens/NVIDIA partnership, identifying five areas of collaboration to help accelerate digital transformation: AI native chip design, AI-native simulation, AI-driven adaptive manufacturing, next-generation AI factories, and mutual acceleration loops.
Busch then announced the launch of Siemens' Digital Twin Composer, which leverages NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to build and operate an industrial metaverse environment, where users can use real-time engineering data and AI to conduct simulations, train autonomous robots, and optimize processes. PepsiCo was introduced as a successful case study; after using Digital Twin Composer, the company reported a 20% increase in efficiency after only three months and an estimated 10-15% reduction in CapEx across operations.
Busch also shared Siemens’ related products, including:
- PAVE360 Automotive: An off-the-shelf, ready-to-use digital twin platform for automakers and suppliers that simplifies increasingly complex automotive hardware-software integration and speeds time to market for critical applications.
- Luma: A platform that enables scientists to unify scattered research data and ask questions, conduct AI-powered simulations, and run experiments in the digital world before starting costly production, accelerating time to market for new medicines.
- AI Copilots: The company announced the launch of nine new AI-powered industrial copilots and wearables, including Ray-Ban Meta glasses that offer workers on the factory floor real-time, hands-free guidance from connected experts.
And, of course, the other trillion-dollar question that really brings us full circle on Siemens is how to generate enough electricity to power all this new technology. Busch acknowledged that while power availability is the actual bottleneck, AI can help predict load strain, maximizing grid capacity by 20% without building new infrastructure. Additionally, using AI to simulate the effect of adding electric vehicle charging stations in a specific geographic area or to coordinate buildings to briefly reduce consumption to reduce bottlenecks.
At the close of the keynote, Busch predicted that industrial AI will become as invisible, much like electricity, and that’s when we’ll have realized its potential.
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