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.

Delays bringing medical treatment to market can cost pharmaceutical companies millions of dollars a day in lost revenue. And as treatments take 10 to 12 years to be greenlit, companies need to start production immediately after approval. Thus, engineers must design plants before product, recipe and workflow finalization. This introduces significant uncertainty within a project that demands success on first use.

In this episode, experts in the pharmaceutical and life science industry discuss how Roche uses a comprehensive digital twin to overcome the uncertainties related to the design of greenfield, pharmaceutical production facilities.

In this podcast you will learn:

(01:40) How to adapt to the big changes in the pharmaceutical space

(03:50) How to overcome the challenges of building greenfield plants for life sciences

(06:05) How Roche’s new project addresses plant development uncertainty

(13:58) When comprehensive digital twins transition from models to decision tools

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. He 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.

Artificial Intelligence has come to dominate conversation in consumer and industrial spaces. The recent explosion in AI capabilities and applications is a confluence of factors, producing an exciting landscape of innovation, new challenges and immense opportunity.

In this special episode, listen to the complete discussion between host Conor Peick and guests Matthias Loskyll and Samir Desai as they discuss why Industrial AI has taken off today, how it is being deployed in engineering software and production hardware, how AI agents are already factoring into the future of industry and more!

In the episode you’ll learn about:

(00:00) Why Industrial AI has exploded now

(10:02) Many types of Industrial AI, from predictive to agentic

(24:25) Breaking down data silos through the data fabric

(47:34) The future of agents as autonomous systems under human supervision

About the voices:

Matthias Loskyll is the Senior Director of AI and Robotics at Siemens Digital Industries with a PhD in Production Automation.

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

Conor Peick is a Marketing Professional creating forward-looking content for the Thought Leadership team at Siemens Digital Industries Software.

Agentic AI is emerging as a transformational paradigm across industries, with the potential to reshape how companies design, manufacture and manage operations. Yet, transformations take time and, especially in the case of AI agents imbued with a level of autonomy, require careful planning and robust infrastructure to ensure human experts maintain final review and approval authority.

In this episode, host Conor Peick is joined by guests Matthias Loskyll and Samir Desai to discuss how AI agents are already factoring into the future of industry, and how companies can best approach their adoption.

In the episode you’ll learn about:

(00:00) Introduction and the future of AI agents in industry

(03:51) A brief explanation of Model Context Protocol

(07:23) How humans and machines may work together in the future

(09:18) Potential developments and how to approach AI adoption

About the voices:

Matthias Loskyll is the Senior Director of AI and Robotics at Simens Digital Industries with a PhD in Production Automation.

Samir Desai is the Senior Director and Global Program Head for Data and AI at Simens Digital Industries with more than 30 years’ experience developing and managing industrial software sweats.

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.