As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption spreads, more companies are confronting realities around data storage, access and integration. As the future of increasingly autonomous AI agents looms, companies are eager to resolve issues in their data foundations in preparation for the future.

In this episode of the Future Ready Podcast, we are joined again by Samir Desai, Senior Director for AI and Data Strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Samir and Spencer explore how Siemens is putting its industrial AI foundation to work, from securing customer data in AI-powered workflows to the emergence of AI agents across the portfolio.

In this episode you will learn:

(00:10) Data security and access control in AI workflows

(03:40) Future AI agents at Siemens

(06:59) What makes Siemens stand out in the Industrial AI space

About the voices:

Samir Desai is the Senior Director and Global Program Head for Data and AI at Siemens Digital Industries Software with more than 30 years of experience developing and managing industrial software suites.

Spencer Acain is a technical marketing writer for AI and verticals thought leadership at Siemens Digital Industries with a background in Applied Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering.

In this episode, host Conor Peick is joined by Katharina Westrich, Global VP of Electronics and Semiconductors at Siemens, to talk about the world of electronics and semiconductors and how it is changing amid the artificial intelligence transformation in industry.

In the episode you’ll learn about:

(00:20) Katharina’s journey to working in the electronics and semiconductor industry

(03:14) What’s changing most dramatically in the industry now and in the near future

(06:01) Other trends flying under the radar

(09:11) The challenge of talent scarcity

(10:13) More details on how AI is impacting the semiconductor industry

About the voices:

Katharina Westrich is Global VP of Electronics and Semiconductors at Siemens. In this role Katharina heads a team focused on unlocking the potential of resilient, smart, and sustainable semiconductor and electronics manufacturing across the entire value chain.

Conor Peick is a Marketing Professional creating forward-looking content for the Thought Leadership team at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Conor collaborates with industry experts and executives to produce impactful content exploring the challenges companies face and the technologies that can provide solutions.

Bringing manufacturing closer to the consumer can, for many products, make a lot of sense yet, to achieve that, no single company could hope to have enough facilities to serve all their customers worldwide. To achieve this dream will require the ability to delegate production to local factories capable of rapidly reconfiguring to produce a given product no matter what it might be, something that is currently out of reach, yet still tantalizingly close.

In this episode, host Conor Peick is joined by Alastair Orchard to look at the future of production where AI, digitalization and smart contracts enable the paradigm of the factory owner-operator who can, by contract, locally produce goods from major brands the world over.

In the episode you’ll learn about:

(0:20) Smart contracts enable distributed manufacturing

(3:09) Resilient production through factory owner-operators

(7:23) What the future of AI-enabled modular factories looks like

About the voices:

Alastair Orchard is the head of Digital Enterprise Thought Leadership for Siemens Digital Industries, working with multinationals to become more flexible, cost effective, transparent, collaborative organizations, and to bring their world-class products to market faster than their competitors. He is also the co-founder and CTO of dimax.cloud - a distributed manufacturing platform that cuts the cost, carbon and complexity from supply chains. Conor Peick is a Marketing Professional creating forward-looking content for the Thought Leadership team at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Conor collaborates with industry experts and executives to produce impactful content exploring the challenges companies face and the technologies that can provide solutions.

Businesses across industries and regions have already invested in how to collect data, some even hired entire teams to make it more readable without a degree in data science. But it is not helpful to just look at it. The goal was, and is, to make it actionable. Edge computing has started many businesses down this transition, but software-defined automation and even AI tools are bringing these insights into the factory execution layer to do even more.

In this episode of the podcast, Rainer Brehm sits down with David Humphrey of ARC and our guest moderator Conor Peick for part two of their three-part conversation.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

(00:00) Investing in execution

(03:13) An open ecosystem

(07:45) Trailblazing industries & regions

(15:20) CapEx to OpEx

About the voices:

Rainer Brehm is the Chief Operations Officer (COO) for the automation business and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Siemens Digital Industries. In these roles, he drives the strategic advancement of Siemens’ automation portfolio and leads the development of technologies such as Industrial AI and Software-Defined Automation to unlock the full potential of automation. His focus is on making production more adaptive, resilient, and sustainable. His vision is an automated automation that solves unknown tasks independently.

David Humphrey is an analyst at ARC Europe. And is a member of ARC’s hybrid manufacturing, packaging and industrial networking teams. He has over 25 years experience in industrial automation across specification, design and programming in a variety of industries.

Conor Peick is a Marketing Professional creating forward-looking content for the Thought Leadership team at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Conor collaborates with industry experts and executives to produce impactful content exploring the challenges companies face and the technologies that can provide solutions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded into mainstream discourse as technologists, professionals and general consumers gain familiarity with generative AI assistants and chatbots. Yet as AI adoption accelerates, industrial users must understand the critical distinction between consumer and industrial-focused AI.

In this episode of the Future Ready Podcast, we are joined by Samir Desai, Senior Director for AI and Data Strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Samir helped us dive into the difference between consumer and industrial-grade AI, how industrial AI solutions are developed and the different roles occupied by key players in the industrial AI landscape.

In this episode you will learn:

(00:00) Introduction and Samir’s background

(02:01) How hyperscalers and software developers partner

(10:32) How Siemens approaches industrial AI integration

About the voices:

Samir Desai is the Senior Director and Global Program Head for Data and AI at Siemens Digital Industries Software with more than 30 years of experience developing and managing industrial software suites.

Spencer Acain is a technical marketing writer for AI and verticals thought leadership at Siemens Digital Industries with a background in Applied Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering.

The idea of a modular factory brings to mind something space age and futuristic, with the ability to rapidly adapt and scale production systems through a network of connected shops providing different services yet, to achieve that, there are many real challenges to overcome. From quality to the human factor, creating a modular factory that can meet the demands of modern product design is no easy task.

In this episode, host Conor Peick is joined by Alastair Orchard to discuss what it takes to ensure a modular factory concept is up to the task of creating a high quality product as well as the importance of combining both advanced digitalization concepts with human in the loop elements to achieve an ideal result.

In the episode you’ll learn about:

(0:18) How to maintain quality in a modular factory

(3:28) The importance of AI and the Digital Twin

(7:06) The human factor in flexible production

About the voices:

Alastair Orchard is the head of Digital Enterprise Thought Leadership for Siemens Digital Industries, working with multinationals to become more flexible, cost effective, transparent, collaborative organizations, and to bring their world-class products to market faster than their competitors. He is also the co-founder and CTO of dimax.cloud - a distributed manufacturing platform that cuts the cost, carbon and complexity from supply chains. Conor Peick is a Marketing Professional creating forward-looking content for the Thought Leadership team at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Conor collaborates with industry experts and executives to produce impactful content exploring the challenges companies face and the technologies that can provide solutions.

A lot of people are involved in the development of new pharmaceutical products, from engineers to operators, c-level leadership and more. As a result, digital transformations can seem daunting, as everyone must buy into the process for it to be successful.

But how do you convince them all? Especially when considering the complexity and time involved getting new treatments to market. Well, what if they could cut that timeline in half? What if treatments could get in the hands of patients faster, safer and reliably?

In this podcast you will learn:

(00:36) Where pharmaceutical companies get stuck during digital transformations

(10:55) What the scalable success of digital transformations looks like

(15:45) Firsthand expert best practices for digital transformations

About the voices:

Jan Wokittel, Director of Smart Manufacturing at Roche

Jan is responsible for the digitization technologies used in greenfield pharmaceutical and medical device production facilities. For over seven years, he has helped Roche plan and implement large scale capital expenditure projects.

Andy Whytock, Head of Market Strategy and Thought Leadership of Life Sciences at Siemens

Andy is responsible for driving digital transformation initiatives and thought leadership activities in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector and specializes in helping life sciences manufacturers embrace digital transformation, adopt cutting-edge technologies and evolve into fully connected, data-driven and sustainable enterprises.

Conor Peick, Marketing Professional for the Thought Leadership team at Siemens Digital Industries Software

Conor is responsible for creating forward-looking content for Siemens Digital Industries Software. He collaborates with industry experts and executives to produce impactful content exploring the challenges companies face and the technologies that can provide solutions.

Disparate industry systems have trapped data into silos for too long. Industries know the dangers of keeping teams in the dark and the benefits of breaking down data walls. But systems incompatibilities between mission critical tools hinder the ability to produce system-wide, comprehensive digital twins.

The industrial metaverse addresses this problem by linking simulations, data stores and digital twins into ecosystems of unified models. Producing such a digital world, however, requires technology and business partners with the right DNA and a vision of an interoperable future.

In this podcast you will learn:

(00:30) The real benefit of the industrial metaverse

(06:07) How digital twins are the core technology of the metaverse

(12:21) How to choose the best technology partners to build the industrial metaverse

About the voices:

Jan Wokittel, Director of Smart Manufacturing at Roche

Jan is responsible for the digitization technologies used in greenfield pharmaceutical and medical device production facilities. For over seven years, he has helped Roche plan and implement large scale capital expenditure projects.

Andy Whytock, Head of Market Strategy and Thought Leadership of Life Sciences at Siemens

Andy is responsible for driving digital transformation initiatives and thought leadership activities in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector and specializes in helping life sciences manufacturers embrace digital transformation, adopt cutting-edge technologies and evolve into fully connected, data-driven and sustainable enterprises.

Conor Peick, Marketing Professional for the Thought Leadership team at Siemens Digital Industries Software

Conor is responsible for creating forward-looking content for Siemens Digital Industries Software. He collaborates with industry experts and executives to produce impactful content exploring the challenges companies face and the technologies that can provide solutions.

Automation is everywhere in the process industries; it is maybe one of the most advanced markets in this regard. But businesses in this space are still feeling the crunch when it comes to flexibility and adaptability of their processes. A major challenge of integrating flexibility into processes is ensuring the high safety and quality margins for industries like pharmaceuticals and food production.

To explore this and more, we sat down with Mark Hindsbo and Rebecca Vangenechten for this episode Siemens’ Future-Ready Podcast.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

(00:00) The state of automation

(02:43) Unique challenges of process industries

(06:09) Role of operations software

(10:08) Real world use-cases

About the voices:

Mark Hindsbo joined Siemens in 2025 as Head of Operations Software. He is leading a team to build an integrated and modular industrial operations software suite that allows customers to design, engineer, and operate their factories, data centers, or plants – powered by agentic AI and digital twins. His extensive career includes leadership roles at Ansys, Parallels, and Microsoft, alongside experiences at The Boston Consulting Group, Novo Nordisk, and CERN. Mark is also an Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Born and educated in Denmark, he holds an M.S. in Applied Physics & Mathematics from the Technical University of Denmark.

Rebecca Vangenechten has been the Head of Automation and Engineering for Process Automation at Siemens since 2023 – helping customers and partners through the entire plant lifecycle with engineering, consulting and modernization. But her background in Biomedical Sciences and Endocrinology is perfect for understanding the challenges of process industries.

Nick Finberg is a technical marketing writer and coordinator for Software-Defined Everything, with a background in Nuclear Engineering. He has worked with experts to cover many industries and topics including Automotive, Battery, sustainability, and systems engineering.

Following the industrial revolution and the rise of globalization, mass produced and consumer packaged goods (CPG) have been manufactured on the concept of centralization; a factory in a central location produces a product before shipping it to warehouses the world over. While this approach has many benefits, in recent years it has become increasingly clear it might not always be the best way.

In this episode, host Conor Peick is joined by Alastair Orchard to explore the future of CPG manufacturing from shifting left to networks of local production facilities before taking this concept right to the edge with a pop-up factory that can be shipped in a container.

In the episode you’ll learn about:

(0:38) The evolution of manufacturing

(3:50) How companies will change demand forecasting

(6:00) The value of a decentralized network of production

(9:46) Building a pop-up factory

About the voices:

Alastair Orchard is the head of Digital Enterprise Thought Leadership for Siemens Digital Industries, working with multinationals to become more flexible, cost effective, transparent, collaborative organizations, and to bring their world-class products to market faster than their competitors. He is also the co-founder and CTO of dimax.cloud - a distributed manufacturing platform that cuts the cost, carbon and complexity from supply chains. Conor Peick is a Marketing Professional creating forward-looking content for the Thought Leadership team at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Conor collaborates with industry experts and executives to produce impactful content exploring the challenges companies face and the technologies that can provide solutions.