Siemens: You’ve got an (AI) co-worker in me

Siemens has followed the trend perpetuated by IFS and others to introduce software that employs agentic AI virtual workers alongside human employees to redefine industrial workflows and help perform high-volume or repetitive tasks on the factory floor.

The Siemens product is called Intelligence Center X, it’s part of the company’s Xcelerator software portfolio and, like IFS before it, Siemens rolled out this signature product in front of hundreds of attendees, this presentation last week in Detroit at its Realize LIVE. ICX was the company's lead product announcement at the show.

See also: IFS debuts package of ‘digital workers’ in next iteration of agentic AI industrial software

During the rollout in the Motor City, Siemens announced ICX is designed to work alongside existing operations and data solutions to enable agentic workflows to operate with trusted data across a “broader ecosystem” and is supported by Siemens’ data and cloud ecosystem partners.

The primary benefit of ICX, Siemens repeated, was that its AI agents, similar to the ones IFS rolled last year, function as "digital co-workers," embedded alongside people so that the AI can be scaled, as a hybrid workforce at the production level, “enabling organizations to move beyond pilots and operate with speed, control and consistency.”

The product allows AI to move beyond the pilot or experimentation stage into everyday workflows, noted Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens Digital Industries Software, the arm of the multinational corporation that debuted ICX at Realize LIVE.

“When AI is connected to real business processes and enterprise data, it delivers measurable impact at scale,” Hemmelgarn added.

Siemens ICX joins IFS with AI-powered industrial assistants

Siemens’ Intelligence Center X follows along similarly to IFS’s “digital workers,” enabled via the IFS Loops platform. Both are agentic, AI-powered enablers of industrial assistants. IFS advertises theirs as designed to operate like virtual colleagues in asset-intensive industries.

Neither products function even remotely like basic automation.

IFS says that unlike basic automation, its agentic offering processes information, makes context-aware decisions, executes workflows across multiple systems, and handles complex operational exceptions with minimal oversight from flesh-and-blood humans.

These digital workers are purpose-built to bridge the gap between enterprise planning and real-world execution, according to IFS.

See also: Why industrial AI requires a data ops foundation to scale

And the IFS “workers” are aimed at specific departments and functions such as supply chain management (ranking alternate suppliers, automatically releasing purchase orders, tracking confirmations, and flagging excess costs), procurement (reconciling supplier orders across dozens of vendors, automatically extract vital info from supplier emails and portals, verify against purchase orders), and inventory control (monitoring inventory positions demands and executing routine replenishments.

Siemens said ICX is designed to connect data across engineering, manufacturing, supply chain and service into shared lifecycle intelligence that AI can act on. In more technical terms, according to Siemens, ICX combines the Mendix low-code platform with its Graph Studio and AI Studio software from its Rapidminer portfolio to create the enterprise context, business-specific lifecycle intelligence, and orchestrated agents and intelligent applications.

Using Intelligence Center X, Siemens said customers are already reporting measurable results, a 95% reduction in manual effort and 85% faster production issue resolution.

Siemens said ICX user Vivix Vidros Planos of Brazil is using AI-powered Virtual Engineer, built on Intelligence Center X with Amazon Bedrock and Claude from Anthropic, and is headed toward a digital twin strategy using the multi-agent capabilities in ICX.

See also: With new software team-up, AVEVA and IFS think they’ve closed the gap between AI insight and action

Vivix, a flat glass manufacturer, deployed nearly 30 Mendix applications connecting OT and IT data across SAP S/4HANA, Siemens Industrial Edge, and Snowflake.

Results, according to Siemens, include an 85% reduction in production issue resolution time, 6,000 hours of manual work recaptured in a year, and customer complaint resolution shrunk from five days to under one.

Said Aristóteles Terceiro Neto, Vivix’s industrial transformation manager: “We are already seeing significant enterprise value, including up to 4 times faster resolution times in quality-related investigations, as well as measurable improvements in how we support decision-making on the shop floor.”