Collaboration Drives AI Forward at HANNOVER MESSE

This year, I had the opportunity to be part of HANNOVER MESSE, one of the world’s largest and most influential industrial trade fairs, where I was proud to present at the Microsoft booth. Across the show floor, exhibitors demonstrated how AI, robotics, and digitalization are translating into competitive advantage.

Being featured within the Microsoft ecosystem reflects not only the strength of our long-standing collaboration but also the growing importance of partner-driven innovation in driving market-ready, scalable solutions as a community.

The event kicked off with a keynote by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who noted, “AI will contribute to greater efficiency and productivity, to optimized resource utilization, and above all to reduced costs…It will thus strengthen the competitiveness of industrial production.”

At the booth, we showcased one of our latest advancements in engineering AI, together with SICK, one of the world’s leading providers of sensor-based solutions for the industrial sector. The demo focused on how generative and agentic AI can augment human judgment, improve product structures, and increase efficiency. It featured our Variant BOM Agent, built on Aras InnovatorEdge and developed using Microsoft Foundry. Together, these technologies provide a foundation in complex engineering environments, turning fragmented data into a connected, AI-ready digital thread.

As product variety continues to grow, so does the complexity behind managing it. As Marcellus Menges, vice president of global R&D at SICK, shared, “Aras’ AI-powered solution helps us analyze dependencies, identify conflicts earlier, and create visibility across configurations. It allows us to process large volumes of data faster and make more confident decisions, reducing risk, accelerating time to market, and strengthening our competitiveness.”

One of the most compelling aspects of the demo was how engineers can interact with the system to explore product variants, refine rules, and validate outcomes. Rather than replacing expertise, the agent supports it. This enables teams to work faster while maintaining control and traceability. The demo also highlighted a shared understanding of the challenges behind today’s “variant explosion,” and the opportunity to move from engineering-to-order to more scalable configure-to-order models, without disrupting existing PLM or ERP environments.

As our CTO, Rob McAveney, said, this reflects “a practical, real-world application of AI across the digital thread,” helping manufacturers move beyond isolated experiments toward scalable transformation.

This broader trend was visible across the entire show floor. HANNOVER MESSE 2026 placed a strong emphasis on the tangible business value of industrial AI. As Deutsche Messe CEO Jochen Köckler noted, competitiveness today depends on how quickly innovations are put into practice. AI is no longer a vision for the future; it is already driving measurable gains in efficiency, productivity, and resource utilization across industries.

This message was supported at the highest level. Chancellor Merz highlighted AI as a key lever for strengthening industrial competitiveness, emphasizing its role in improving efficiency, reducing costs, and enabling smarter use of resources. His call for making AI frameworks more accessible reflects the urgency many organizations feel: turning AI from potential into practical, scalable value.

This bolstered a clear focus on governed collaboration between humans and AI, as well as the growing importance of working closely with partners and customers to bring solutions to life.

For me, it reinforced a distinct shift: AI in engineering is no longer about isolated experiments. It is about governed collaboration between humans and AI embedded within existing processes and scaled across the digital thread.

Walking the floor, what stood out wasn’t just the technology; it was the spirit and momentum behind it. There is a growing clarity across the industry that AI is not about replacing expertise. It is about amplifying it, grounding it in governed data, and scaling it through collaboration.

That perspective was echoed by industry analysts. In a recent LinkedIn post, Narayan Gokhale, VP and principal analyst at QKS Group, highlighted how demonstrations like this reflect a broader shift toward making the digital thread more actionable with AI, moving from simply connecting data to interpreting it, recommending decisions, and enabling scalable reuse. As he noted, it’s a shift from “experimentation to real engineering impact.”

If you’re exploring how AI can be applied in a practical, governed way across your product lifecycle, or if you’d like to learn more about what we demonstrated at HANNOVER MESSE, leave a comment, reach out to me via email, or connect on LinkedIn. These conversations are where ideas start to take shape and where real progress begins.