Siemens recently launched the SIGA (Solution for Industrial Greenhouse Automation) platform, integrating their industrial control systems with specialized greenhouse horticulture to optimize climate control, irrigation, and energy use.

Models show that roughly 90% of industrial energy demand could be electrified. This edition takes a look at the latest research about equipment realities, strategic scenarios and policy conditions.

Changeist's Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith convened twenty futurists to build the 10F Consortium, ten open, modular forecasts on the forces reshaping the coming decade. Their central finding is that the single rulebook the world once shared has split into several that no longer reconcile, turning forces once treated as background, migration, energy, technology sovereignty, into design constraints for anyone who builds. The work argues that foresight remains human work, since a machine can read the past with perfect clarity but there are no facts about the future.

If 90% of operational truth lives in documents that AI cannot read, how do manufacturers move from insight to action? This AI Manufacturing Day 2026 panel tackled the brownfield reality: plants never designed for AI, critical data trapped in unstructured formats, and why 60% of agentic AI projects are projected to be abandoned this year. Hamish Mackenzie (IIoT World) moderated a discussion with Chris Huff and Anthony Vigliotti (Adlib Software) and Mathias Oppelt (Siemens). The panel dissected where AI stalls in industrial environments and what it takes to build a trust layer for agentic workflows. Mathias Oppelt explained why general purpose AI falls short in industrial settings. Large language models trained to generate plausible text are not sufficient for industry, where reliability must be proven and a wrong answer can cause physical harm. Industrial AI must speak the language of engineers: understanding drawings, simulation models, and technical context beyond words. He shared a recent example where an 86-year-old engineer had to be hired back to resolve a line shutdown that cost $1.5 million over four weeks, because no current staff had the legacy system knowledge. Chris Huff outlined the shift from systems of insight to systems of action. Agentic AI is real today for high-volume, lower-stakes work like procurement, contract review, and supplier onboarding. It is not yet real for high-stakes, low-volume decisions where a wrong answer means a recall or safety event. He identified three places where pilots consistently stall: ingestion of messy multi-format documents, validation and traceability back to source, and integration into PLM, ERP, and QMS systems. Anthony Vigliotti proposed treating manufacturing documents as evidence, applying standards of relevance, reliability, authenticity, and chain of custody. He highlighted a problem many overlook: AI systems forced to clip relevant information due to context window overruns, leading to incomplete outputs that drive real operational consequences when acting on those outputs. This session was sponsored by Adlib Software. Editorially independent.

Before David Erhard was building communities for one of the world's largest industrial companies, he was doing it for EA Sports and FIFA. His path from Nuremberg to the gaming industry and back again turns out to be surprisingly relevant, and it shapes how he thinks about everything SXC is trying to do.

We are launching a new community survey to understand your perspective on the intersection of AI and workforce transformation.

The FarmTech Society (FTS) has officially launched a transformative collaboration on the Siemens Xcelerator platform, shifting the Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) landscape from isolated innovation to a connected, global ecosystem. As the community curator and anchor, FTS is opening the doors to a world-class digital and renewable energy network, ensuring that every stakeholder—from visionary startups to multi-generational growers—has the tools to thrive without the burden of "reinventing the wheel." This partnership is built on the principle of egoless collaboration, removing the technical and financial barriers that have historically fragmented the sector. By providing a curated, trusted pathway to digitalization and circular resource management, the initiative allows the community to focus on outcomes rather than infrastructure. The ecosystem will be fully operational at GreenTech Amsterdam (June 9-11), inviting the entire sector to join a unified space where knowledge, technology, and people grow in tandem.

Digital twins are being put to work across industrial operations, aerospace, healthcare, and everything in between. This edition of Industry Signals revisits the topic with a focus on deployment of this technology as use cases grow more demanding, as well as what technology leaders get wrong at the start of a digital twin investment.