Industrial AI is moving past the chatbot phase. From the Hannover Messe show floor to system integration workflows, here's what end users actually want now.
Vlad just returned from his first Hannover Messe, the largest industrial automation and manufacturing trade show in Europe. The takeaway that defined the week was a shift in how end users open conversations. A year ago, every booth visit started with the question, do you have AI? This year every vendor has some flavor of AI, so the question has flipped back to the one that actually matters. How does your product solve a specific problem in my plant? Vlad and Dave unpack what that shift means for vendors, integrators, and the end users buying these tools.
On the end user side, the reality is mixed. Most knowledge workers in manufacturing have access to Microsoft Copilot and use it for better emails and meeting notes. Everything else is still mostly experimentation. While auditing PLC and SCADA logic on a recent project, Vlad expected the customer to insist on a hardened on premise model with a Dell IPC and dedicated GPUs. Instead, they shrugged and said put it in ChatGPT, the boilerplate logic has no real IP. Data governance on the carpeted side of the business is mature. On the OT side, it barely exists, and that gap matters as more plant floor data flows toward AI tools.
For systems integrators, AI is compressing timelines on slow, repetitive work. Tag validation, electrical drawing automation, screenshot to bill of materials extraction, and functional spec to PLC starting points are all in active development. The tradeoff is that some of these tools save four weeks of manual auditing but require a couple of weeks to set up correctly, and a probabilistic LLM still demands human signoff on safety and control logic. Senior engineers benefit most because they already know what good output looks like. The bigger industry question is what happens to the junior to senior pipeline if entry level work disappears.
Hardware tells a different story. Moore's Law, first proposed in 1965, held for about 60 years before chip density at three nanometers and heat budgets broke the cost curve. GPUs on the consumer side have been roughly stagnant since the Nvidia 30 series. On the industrial side, demand for radical hardware change has been low. PLCs, switches, IO modules, and field protocols look much like they did twenty years ago. IO Link, the protocol that should be a baseline for any Industry 4.0 deployment, was founded in 2006. Image recognition has unlocked pick and place applications that used to be too expensive to engineer the traditional way.
The workforce thread runs underneath all of this. UPS recently negotiated voluntary buyouts of roughly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per driver to remove tens of thousands of positions, while large technology firms continue to lay off staff and reinvest in data centers.
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
1:50 Hannover Messe scale, halls, and country delegations
7:20 Booth diversity from startups to hyperscalers and the German military
12:20 Why end users have stopped asking, do you have AI
19:00 The 1% on the bleeding edge versus the rest of industry
25:50 End users sending boilerplate PLC code through ChatGPT
29:20 Data governance on the OT side
32:50 AI inside systems integration workflows
39:50 Workforce shifts: UPS buyouts, FAANG layoffs, and reskilling
47:20 Hardware innovation, Moore's Law, and the industrial side
59:50 SCADA, MES, ERP, and AI generated dashboards
1:03:30 Upcoming shows: Automate 2026, ICC, and more
References
Hannover Messe: https://www.hannover-messe.de
Automate 2026: https://www.automateshow.com
Ignition Community Conference: https://icc.inductiveautomation.com
Rockwell Automation Fair: https://www.rockwellautomation.com/automationfair
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/vladimirromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Edge Computing, AI, and the Value of Manufacturing Data: https://www.joltek.com/blog/edge-computing-ai-value-manufacturing-data
Systems Integrators in Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/system-integrators
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/
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