Alejandro Preinfalk, CEO of Siemens Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, has articulated the transformative role of industrial artificial intelligence (AI) in driving digital innovation across industries, underscoring its profound impact on efficiency, sustainability, and productivity. His insights, shared in an in-depth interview, reveal how Siemens integrates AI not merely as an efficiency tool but as a foundational technology that is reshaping product design, operation, and environmental stewardship, while maintaining a strong human-centric approach.
AI has transitioned from a futuristic promise to a central pillar of industrial operation. Siemens has been a pioneer in embedding AI algorithms into diverse industrial processes long before AI entered mainstream discourse through platforms such as ChatGPT. The company’s AI capabilities span designing everything from rockets to everyday items like plastic bottles, tailored through specific parameters to optimise outcomes. AI has even played a crucial role in collaborative efforts with pharmaceutical firms to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine development, highlighting its real-world impact in life-saving applications.
Preinfalk stresses that digital transformation in industry is not a matter of choice but an imperative urgency. Companies that delay or resist digitizing risk being out-competed by counterparts employing AI, big data, and automation, both locally and globally. Siemens’ Accelerator platform represents a strategic initiative to support firms in their digital evolution, encompassing product design, process monitoring, and predictive maintenance through a reliable digital ecosystem aimed at enhancing productivity and operational confidence.
A particularly notable synergy that Siemens champions is between AI and environmental sustainability. Preinfalk points out that AI-enabled optimisation can reduce energy consumption by up to 20% in industrial plant design alone. Siemens’ SiGREEN platform exemplifies this approach by providing measurement and management of CO₂ emissions, which has gained traction in regions like Querétaro and Coahuila. This platform helps identify emission reduction opportunities while aligning sustainability goals with operational efficiency, affirming the CEO’s assertion that technology is critical to producing more with less environmental impact amid planetary resource limits.
Siemens distinguishes its industrial AI from general-purpose AI commonly found in chatbots, noting the critical necessity of reliability, predictability, and safety in industrial contexts where errors could cause significant financial or human harm. The Industrial Copilot embodies this approach, translating human instructions into machine language to streamline manufacturing tasks without requiring programming expertise. It can also monitor operational health, detect anomalies, and predict failures, thereby enabling proactive maintenance that minimises costly downtime.
Addressing concerns about AI replacing human jobs, Preinfalk presents a forward-looking perspective—AI augments human capabilities rather than supplants them. The decisive factor is the ability to harness AI effectively, which demands continuous skill evolution and adaptability from the workforce. He draws parallels to previous technological shifts, such as the advent of the internet and robotics, which ultimately created more jobs and opportunities. Siemens actively supports this transition by investing in education and training programs to foster a growth mindset and bridge the gap between academia and industry.
Beyond operational advances, Siemens leverages digital twins—virtual replicas of products, processes, and environments—to enable simulation and optimisation without physical prototypes. This capability saves time, cuts costs, and reduces errors, enabling precise translation from digital models to physical production. The integrated platforms Siemens offers facilitate competitiveness and resilience regardless of company size, reinforcing the critical nature of comprehensive digital transformation.
Recent strategic developments reinforce Siemens’ AI ambitions. The company appointed Vasi Philomin, an AI expert from Amazon, as head of data and artificial intelligence, signalling intensified focus on scaling AI capabilities alongside industrial software development. Siemens’ signature AI tool, the Industrial Copilot, is central to this vision, receiving continuous enhancements including new generative AI-powered maintenance solutions launched in partnership with Microsoft Azure. These innovations aim to elevate maintenance from reactive to predictive, supporting efficiency and resilience across multiple sites.
Siemens also showcased these advancements at CES 2025, demonstrating how AI-powered solutions like the Industrial Copilot bring real-time decision-making to the shop floor, enhancing productivity while reducing downtime. The Industrial Copilot ecosystem is expanding to encompass diverse industrial sectors including discrete and process manufacturing, infrastructure, and mobility.
Despite a broader market slowdown in factory automation—partly due to declining demand in China and Europe—Siemens relies on its digital platform Xcelerator to drive growth. This platform integrates hardware, software, and services, supported by a large ecosystem of partners and products, and has seen robust growth particularly in China, India, Germany, and the U.S. The company’s digital software sales rose significantly even amid wider challenges, underscoring the resilience and strategic importance of AI and digital transformation in its portfolio.
Through these initiatives and insights, Siemens presents a compelling narrative: the digital transformation of industry through trustworthy, sustainable AI is not just an operational upgrade but a strategic imperative that shapes competitiveness, environmental responsibility, and the future of work. As Preinfalk concludes, the true risk lies not in technology displacing humans but in the refusal to evolve alongside it—a call to action for businesses and individuals alike in a world driven by rapid change.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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