Manufacturing Hub

AI can finally write back to the plant floor, but only if you can trust it. Chris Stevens and Annemarie Breu of Siemens explain how orchestration makes that safe.
Industrial AI has reached a turning point. Manufacturers can already collect data, contextualize it, and surface insights, but the hardest step has always been turning insight into action on real control equipment. Chris Stevens and Annemarie Breu of Siemens explain how an orchestration layer finally closes that loop. Annemarie frames the tension clearly. Automation depends on determinism, while large language models are probabilistic by design, so the goal is to bring that discipline into AI and validate any suggestion before it changes a set point.
Most executive conversations start with return on investment, and two forces are making the case easier to prove. The workforce shortage has stretched the expected payback window from 18 months toward 36 months, and when a line cannot run for lack of people every idle minute costs thousands of dollars. The other driver is overall equipment effectiveness, since most plants run near 70 percent OEE and even a fraction of a percent of gain can justify a project. Energy is a standout case too. A BorgWarner sustainability effort used a digital twin to flatten demand peaks and reportedly paid for itself in under six months, even as data center growth pushes electricity demand higher through 2040.
On trust and safety, Annemarie borrows a principle from industrial safety. Just as fail safe IO modules rely on two channel evaluation, every AI suggestion is validated against a state machine, a workflow, or a physics based digital twin before the orchestration layer passes it to a controller. With virtual commissioning and soft PLCs a change can be tested virtually, approved by a human in the loop, and only then written to control, an approach PepsiCo and NVIDIA echoed at CES when they called the digital twin a must have. Making AI real, the pair argue, comes down to discipline, clear scope, acceptance criteria, and focused 90 day challenges, plus the change management and user experience that drive adoption. Their favorite quick win is preventive maintenance driven by machine data, which both BorgWarner and Maersk tied to millions in savings.
About Chris Stevens
Chris Stevens is President of US Automation at Siemens, where he leads a roughly one billion dollar business spanning software, services, and hardware. He brings more than 25 years across Siemens Digital Industries, starting in the field selling assembly and test equipment, moving into the software and digital twin world, and returning to automation to bring the hardware and software sides of the business together.
About Annemarie Breu
Annemarie Breu is a senior technology leader at Siemens Digital Industries focused on automation software deployment and customer technology partnerships in the US. She began at Siemens about a decade ago as a systems engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area, working with consumer electronics manufacturers on virtual commissioning and digital twins. Her work today centers on bringing the determinism and reliability of automation into industrial AI.
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction and Automate 2026 preview
2:50 Meet Chris Stevens and Annemarie Breu
9:30 The first AI question is always ROI
14:00 Workforce gaps and OEE drive the business case
19:30 Energy management and the data center demand surge
23:20 Data, sensors, and contextualization requirements
28:00 Guardrails, hallucinations, and two channel validation
32:40 The digital twin and the human in the loop
37:40 How partners and integrators move up the stack
45:30 What it takes to make AI real on the floor
55:50 Preventive maintenance as a quick win
59:40 Predictions, career advice, and book picks
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results.
Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Edge Computing and the Value of AI in Manufacturing Data: https://www.joltek.com/blog/edge-computing-ai-value-manufacturing-data
IT and OT Architecture Integration: https://www.joltek.com/services/service-details-it-ot-architecture-integration
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation.
Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

Industrial network protocols decide whether a machine talks or stays silent. Chuck from Horner Automation breaks down how they win, fade, and converge.
Chuck has spent 36 years at Horner Automation and lived through what the industry once called the fieldbus wars. Before Horner became known for its all in one controllers, it spent a decade building specialty IO modules for GE Fanuc during the era of DeviceNet, SDS, InterBus S, PROFIBUS, and CANopen. His core argument is that most of those early protocols were technically fine. The ones that became standards won on the commercial weight of the companies backing them, not on superior specifications, with EtherCAT a rare exception that succeeded largely on technical merit.
Trust is the recurring theme. Industry adopts slowly, and for years Ethernet was dismissed as too unreliable and not deterministic enough for control until Ethernet/IP, PROFINET, and Modbus TCP proved themselves. Today the market has settled around a big four set of protocols, and Chuck does not expect it to narrow further. For high speed motion he points to EtherCAT and PROFINET IRT as the implementations he most respects, since both step away from standard Ethernet at the device level to reach submillisecond timing.
The episode is also a reality check on building your own hardware. Chuck and Dave describe how custom development routinely costs teams hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, and how the real trap is obsolescence and maintenance rather than the first build. On the product side, the standout is FPD-Link, a serialization technology borrowed from automotive that carries video, touch, and power over one coaxial cable. Working with Safe Fleet, a maker of ambulances and fire trucks, Horner now mounts rugged displays up to seven meters from the PLC while still programming everything as one device.
Looking ahead, Chuck argues that every PLC should now be treated as a data device first, because digitizing the process is the prerequisite for doing anything useful with AI. He also flags cybersecurity as the next burden for application engineers, with new mandates forcing both manufacturers and integrators to implement protections that were once optional. At Automate, Horner is showing HMI Connect and a 300 dollar CPU 151 that packs 18 IO points, wireless connectivity, and edge capability into a micro PLC.
About Chuck and Horner Automation
Chuck is a technical brand ambassador at Horner Automation, where he has spent 36 years across applications, product management, and education. An electrical engineer who started in the automotive industry, he now produces in depth tutorials on industrial protocols for the Horner APG YouTube channel. Horner Automation is a privately held controls manufacturer best known for its all in one PLC and HMI controllers, edge ready PLCs, and rugged hardware for industrial and mobile applications.
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
2:20 Chuck's Background and 36 Years at Horner Automation
9:20 End User Engineer vs OEM Manufacturer Perspective
13:20 New at Automate: HMI Connect and the CPU 151 Edge PLC
21:30 The Fieldbus Wars and the History of Industrial Protocols
24:20 What It Takes to Implement a Protocol Stack
29:30 Why Protocols Win: Commercial Force vs Technical Merit
32:40 Will Industrial Protocols Ever Converge?
40:30 High Speed Motion: EtherCAT, PROFINET IRT, and Ethernet/IP
44:40 FPD-Link: Rugged Remote HMI for Ambulances and Fire Trucks
55:00 PLCs as Data Devices and the Push Toward AI
1:02:40 Cybersecurity Mandates Coming for Application Engineers
References
Horner Automation: https://www.hornerautomation.com
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results.
Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Understanding Plant Networks: https://www.joltek.com/blog/understanding-plant-networks-how-industrial-connectivity-evolved
Industrial Ethernet Reliability: https://www.joltek.com/blog/industrial-ethernet-reliability
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation.
Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

Change management is the reason most manufacturing improvement projects quietly stall, even when the technical work is sound and the tools are right.
Vlad Romanov and Dave Griffith unpack their own change management war stories from across two decades in industrial automation. Vlad frames change management as understanding risk to the business and to every stakeholder, then putting the process in place that lets the organization absorb that risk. Technical feasibility is the easy half of any project. Getting humans to consistently work the new way is the half that wins or loses the budget.
Vlad joined Procter & Gamble at a site rated four on P&G's Integrated Work Systems maturity scale, the highest in North America at the time. Every loss event triggered a structured root cause analysis cascade. Operator, mechanic, operations engineer, and only then the engineering department. He later moved to Kraft Heinz, which had purchased the same IWS toolkit from P&G. The tools were on the shelf. The site rating was effectively zero. He had spent his early career learning to use the tools without having to deploy them, and that gap is where most transformation programs die.
Dave's lens is more political. Change management starts with one question engineers rarely ask. What is in it for the person you are asking to change? He tells the Joe story, a lead operator with more than 35 years on the floor who interrupted a connected workforce rollout meeting to point out that his team had cycled through every methodology fad of the last two decades. None had stuck. Dave's team asked what hurt the most. Joe kept training new operators who left for a dollar an hour more down the street. The fix was QR codes on equipment linked to procedures Joe recorded once. Joe went from skeptic to evangelist in one session. Find the operator with the deepest tenure, solve their pain, and let them carry the change.
The episode is also honest about what well intentioned incentives do when they miss the mark. Vlad walks through an RCA rollout where management offered a fifty dollar gift card to whoever submitted the most reports each week. The team got a stack of paper. None of it shortened downtime. When real process change goes through a plant, throughput typically drops twenty to thirty percent for weeks or months. That cost has to be visible to leadership before the project starts.
Two practical heuristics close the episode. As a systems integrator deploying MES and SCADA across food and beverage plants, Vlad could often predict success within the first demo by how the room reacted. Continuous improvement teams leaned in. Whiteboard sites pushed back. Dave reinforces that change has to start at the top. If the executive sponsor blows off steering meetings, the floor reads that signal. Change management is a habit, not a project, and habits are built small. Pick one workflow, prove it works, and let the next one earn its slot.
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction and Automate trade show preview
1:30 Booth commitments: Siemens, Horner, and Tigoor
6:00 Dave's Automate session and 4IR booth duty
8:10 Predictions for Automate: physical AI, cobots, and the AI conversation
13:10 Defining change management in manufacturing
22:30 From P&G IWS to Kraft Heinz: tools versus deployment maturity
28:30 What is in it for the person you are asking to change
35:30 The RCA cascade at P&G compared to no process elsewhere
42:30 The fifty dollar gift card incentive that backfired
46:00 The Joe story: QR codes solving real operator pain
58:30 Reading change management success in the first meeting
1:07:00 Start small: the closing takeaway
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results.
Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Lean Six Sigma: https://www.joltek.com/blog/lean-six-sigma
7 Different Root Cause Analysis Techniques in Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/7-different-root-cause-analysis-techniques-manufacturing
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation.
Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

Change management in manufacturing breaks down at the people layer, not the technology layer. This episode explains how engineering leaders actually drive adoption.
Ronald Sherrod is a Staff Automation Engineer at Regeneron deploying a global event based architecture and Unified Namespace rollout across pharmaceutical operations. Ron, Vlad Romanov, and Dave Griffith dig into the parts of change management that rarely make it onto vendor decks. Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub for weekly conversations with industrial automation practitioners.
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Digital Transformation in Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/digital-transformation-in-manufacturing
Mastering the Unified Namespace for Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/mastering-unified-namespace-uns-a-guide-to-data-driven-manufacturing-transformation
Ron makes a point that is rarely stated this directly. The organization implementing the change is the one responsible for it. OEMs and system integrators deliver the box. Consultants help interpret it. Auditors do not call the machine builder when something goes wrong on the floor of a regulated pharmaceutical plant. They walk into the manufacturer and ask whether the audit trails hold up, whether the predicate rule was met, and whether the product is safe for patients. That responsibility cannot be outsourced, even when the technical work is.
That framing changes how engineering managers should think about RFP scope. If the scope is loose, the integrator absorbs the risk and prices accordingly. If the scope is rigorous, bids come back tight and comparable. Negotiating power changes with the size of the buyer. A large pharmaceutical company can dictate hypercare windows, on site commissioning support, and structured training. A small to mid sized manufacturer often cannot, and the result is the metaphorical Ferrari on the plant floor that only ever gets used for grocery runs. Capital was deployed. The technology works. The operation never adopted it.
The episode also goes deep on tribal knowledge and the industrial elder, the technical anchor who carries the institutional history of a unit or process and is often more valuable than the Excel file on a network drive. Senior operators know why a pipe was rerouted fifteen years ago and why a procedure looks irrational on paper but works perfectly in practice. With 59 percent of frontline skilled workers over 55 planning to retire within five years per the Schneider Electric 2024 workforce survey, capturing that knowledge is now a leadership priority, not an engineering task.
On planning, Ron walks through how he runs user story workshops with operators, manufacturing leaders, engineers, and developers in the same room, producing a shared data contract that defines what information moves where, who needs it, and why. He cites a successful SCADA deployment that worked because the organization had inertia, operators had asked for the problem to be solved, and the team was closing a real gap rather than chasing a trend.
Ronald Sherrod is a Staff Automation Engineer at Regeneron, a chemical engineer by training who moved from oil and gas into pharma and now works on event driven architecture, UNS, and robotics initiatives. Ron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdsherrod/
Timestamps
0:00 Welcome and Episode Intro
1:50 Ron's Career: Oil and Gas to Pharma at Regeneron
4:30 Defining Change Management and Its KPIs
8:30 Change Management vs Operational Excellence
11:50 Who Owns Change Management on Industrial Projects
17:00 Negotiating Power: Large vs Small Manufacturers
20:30 Why Capital Projects End Up Mothballed
22:10 Tribal Knowledge and Learning From Operators
26:00 Why Industrial Projects Fail
29:00 The Industrial Elder and Passing Knowledge Through People
31:30 AI Generated Documentation in Manufacturing
35:50 Project Planning and the RFP Process
47:50 A Successful SCADA Deployment and User Story Workshops
54:30 Predictions, Career Advice, and Smart Glasses
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a cohost of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development.
Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Dave Griffith is a cohost of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology.
Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

Inductive Automation cofounders Colby Clegg and Carl Gould go deep on the origins of Ignition, the road to 8.3, and what AI means for industrial automation.
Vlad and Dave host Colby Clegg, CEO, and Carl Gould, CTO, of Inductive Automation together for the first time to trace the full arc of the company. The story begins in 2003, when Sacramento systems integrator Steve Heckman brought Colby and Carl in to build the missing glue layer between OT data and modern IT tooling. What began as logging values into SQL databases became Factory PMI and eventually Ignition.
A key thread is why Ignition broke through when larger automation vendors had superior distribution. Colby points to Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma. Incumbents could not match Inductive's unlimited per gateway pricing or partner with integrators because their own services groups competed with them. Carl adds the culture piece. Inductive refused to gate downloads, kept the module SDK open, made education free, and ran a public forum when competitors called it reckless, a posture they once called innovation without permission.
Ignition 8.3 takes center stage, arriving after a deliberate five year gap from 8.1. Carl frames it as the completion of work that began with 8.0 in 2018. Gateway configuration is now stored in open, readable formats on disk, the gateway web interface was rewritten, and the platform supports orchestration, environmental separation, and infrastructure as code workflows Carl expects to become table stakes. The release also adds event streams, a revamped historian, and perspective drawing tools. For integrators still on 8.1, 8.3 is the version built for distributed deployments across many gateways.
On AI, Carl is candid that the new MCP server module is intentionally a minimum viable product. It ships as a raw toolkit for integrators to author MCP primitives that expose Ignition data to agentic systems like Claude Code. First party MCP tools are coming, but Inductive wants to define the guardrails before shipping an API surface they will support for years. Carl frames AI as a new axis of software possibility, comparable to the shift from DOS to Windows. Colby ties it back to legacy SCADA conversion, framing the security and reliability gains as a national security issue. The episode closes with notes on the Inductive ecosystem, including a new collaboration with Tiger Data behind TimescaleDB, plus career advice on soft skills, context, and agentic coding tools.
About Colby Clegg and Carl Gould
Colby Clegg is the CEO and cofounder of Inductive Automation, the California based company behind Ignition, the cross platform SCADA, MES, and IIoT software used by manufacturers and integrators worldwide. Carl Gould is the CTO and cofounder, leading product and engineering direction across Ignition. Both joined founder Steve Heckman in 2003 and have shaped the platform's open, integrator first philosophy ever since.
Inductive Automation: https://www.inductiveautomation.com
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
1:00 Meet Colby Clegg and Carl Gould
2:00 The origins of Inductive Automation in 2003
8:00 Going to market and the Innovator's Dilemma
10:30 Innovation without permission as company culture
18:50 Ignition 8.0 and the leap to Perspective
26:00 The five year journey to 8.3
38:00 The MCP server module and AI in Ignition
45:30 AI in the control plane and guardrails
52:30 Tiger Data and the technology ecosystem
1:02:30 Career advice for the next generation
1:06:40 What is ripe for innovation
References
Ignition Community Conference: https://icc.inductiveautomation.com
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a cohost of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to reduce the risk of modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results.
Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Colby Clegg on Ignition 8.3 and Industrial Automation: https://www.joltek.com/blog/industrial-automation-colby-clegg-ignition-8-3
Connecting Allen Bradley PLCs to Ignition: https://www.joltek.com/blog/connecting-allen-bradley-plc-ignition
Dave Griffith is a cohost of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation.
Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub