The Siemens Industrial Copilot is the first generative AI-powered assistant for engineering in an industrial environment. Siemens recently announced major new functionalities for the Industrial Copilot and added thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering as a global customer.
The Siemens Industrial Copilot for Engineering is the only copilot currently on the market that writes code for automation engineering. Future capabilities include multimodality and agent concepts, which will make it even more valuable for engineers. To deliver full data sovereignty, the Siemens Industrial Copilot for Operations is planned to be offered as an on-premises hardware-software bundle.
Rainer Brehm, CEO Factory Automation at Siemens, said: “With Siemens’ domain expertise, we’re turning generative AI into industrial-grade solutions that can be deployed without specialised AI expertise. The Siemens Industrial Copilot, the first generative AI-powered product for automation engineering, is a supercharger for industrial automation and will accelerate our customer’s journey toward greater innovation, productivity, and competitiveness.”
thyssenkrupp invests in AI
Competitive pressure and lack of skilled labour are major challenges for industrial companies today. Making generative AI industrial-grade and bringing it to the shopfloor holds a huge potential for overcoming current industrial challenges and improving productivity. In fact, according to a recent Gartner report, by 2028 75% of developers will regularly use generative AI to assist with code creation, up from less than 10% in early 2023.
thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering, a special machine and plant builder, integrated the Copilot for Engineering in a battery machine used for battery quality inspections on electric cars. The industrial company plans to use the genAI-powered assistant at scale – engineering the machines at thyssenkrupp’s global locations from 2025 onwards.
The Industrial Copilot assists thyssenkrupp engineers in creating TIA Portal projects. It helps them develop structured control language (SCL) code faster for programmable logic controllers (PLCs), intelligently integrates the code into the TIA Portal and generates a machine visualisation in WinCC Unified. This allows engineering teams to reduce repetitive and monotonous tasks like automating data management and sensor configuration. They can work more efficiently, optimise processes, and drive innovation.
“thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering and Siemens have been successfully working together for a long time,” says Dr Rolf-Günther Nieberding, CEO of thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering. “I expect that rolling out the Siemens Industrial Copilot across our machines will help us – and therefore our customers – to implement demanding projects in a much shorter time.”
The Siemens Electronics Factory in Erlangen, Germany, implemented the Copilot for Operations across its soldering machines. The Industrial Copilot helps Siemens operators and maintenance engineers to understand a machine’s error codes by translating its messages into natural language. It suggests solutions based on the machine’s details and history by combing through different documents, manuals, and spare part lists. Machine downtime can be significantly reduced, production bottlenecks can be resolved faster, and shift handovers will work more efficiently.
Supercharging the Industrial Copilot
The development of expanded and more powerful functionalities for the Siemens Industrial Copilot has been instrumental in winning thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering as a customer.
The Industrial Copilot for Operations allows shopfloor workers to directly interact with machines and helps them with maintenance tasks, error handling and performance optimisation. In addition, the Industrial Copilot will have multimodal capabilities to analyse and interpret images and drive even more productivity with agent-based automation for a variety of tasks.
To address data security for customers and make sure that data doesn’t leave the shopfloor, the Industrial Copilot for Operations is planned to be offered as an on-premises hardware-software bundle with the Simatic Industrial PC (IPC 1047E).
The Engineering Copilot TIA Essential has been available on the Siemens Xcelerator marketplace since July 2024. While Siemens provides the automation elements of the Industrial Copilot, the natural language processing is carried out by one of the most powerful GPT models using the Azure OpenAI Service of the Microsoft Cloud. This enables enterprise-grade performance, data protection, and reliability.
“Siemens’ generative AI solutions for industry are reliable, secure and trustworthy, thus making industrial AI accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time,” the company says.
