Manufacturing’s moment: Why AI, why now?

Today, AI isn’t just a buzzword or a distant promise. It’s a practical lever for manufacturers to unlock new value, drive efficiency, and build resilience for the future.

At Microsoft Ignite 2025, our team explored how industrial AI is reshaping the economics of manufacturing. Drawing from real-world customer stories and the latest research, we’ll unpack where the ROI is real, what’s driving it, and how you can take the next step on your own AI journey.

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Return on Intelligence: Scaling Business Value with Industrial AI

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From siloed data to intelligence on tap

Every manufacturer knows the pain points: unplanned downtime, inefficiencies that eat into margins, and supply chain blind spots that disrupt delivery. Too often, these issues are compounded by fragmented systems and a lack of real-time data visibility. The result? Slow decision-making and missed opportunities.

But the landscape is changing. According to a 2025 commissioned  Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study on the economic impact of industrial transformation with Microsoft AI, manufacturers that invest in unified data platform and bring together data across IT and Operations Technology (OT) systems could see the following benefits¹:

• Up to 50% reduction in defects
• Up to 50% fewer inventory shortages
• Up to 40% decrease in frequency of equipment failures
• Up to 457% projected ROI over three years

Take KUKA, a global automation leader. Facing fragmented systems and a growing robotics skills gap, KUKA turned to Microsoft Azure AI and Microsoft Foundry Models. The result? Programming time cut by up to 80%, democratizing robotics and accelerating workflow deployment. With predictive insights and real-time analytics, KUKA broke down data silos and empowered teams to innovate faster.

Sustainability: A greener, more profitable path

Manufacturers today are under intensifying pressure from regulators, customers, and their own boards to reduce emissions, increase energy efficiency, and eliminate waste. Yet many sustainability challenges stem from the same root problem: disconnected systems that make it difficult to measure, optimize, and scale improvements across facilities.

But the momentum is shifting. According to the Forrester study on the economic impact of Microsoft’s industrial AI capabilities, manufacturers see AI as a critical lever to drive measurable environmental and financial gains by optimizing energy usage, refining processes, and reducing carbon emissions. With Microsoft AI solutions, surveyed manufacturers who are Microsoft Azure customers expect to achieve:

• 78% expect to reduce energy consumption
• 88% expect to improve energy efficiency
• 53% expect to reduce CO₂ emissions

Take Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management with ambitious sustainability goals to reduce environmental impact and improve efficiency across its operations. By integrating Azure OpenAI and Azure Machine Learning into its EcoStruxure platform, Schneider gained real‑time insight into energy usage, carbon‑related performance, and optimization opportunities. The impact? AI‑powered models that surface efficiency recommendations, accelerate sustainability decision‑making, and help facilities cut waste at scale. And because EcoStruxure underpins thousands of customer deployments, these AI‑powered insights also lets its customers pursue their own sustainability goals with greater speed, accuracy, and measurable operational improvements.

Empowering people: AI as a workforce multiplier

Labor shortages, rising workload complexity, and persistent training bottlenecks continue to stretch manufacturing teams thin. Many frontline and knowledge workers spend too much time searching for information, navigating outdated systems, or performing repetitive tasks that slow productivity and sap morale.

But AI is shifting this dynamic. Manufacturers are adopting intelligent assistants, predictive tools, and automated workflows that free employees to focus on higher‑value work. According to recent industry data, organizations are already seeing material gains:

• 66% of repetitive tasks automated
• 70% of organizations report productivity gains
• 75% reduction in onboarding time

Take Audi AG, a global automotive leader navigating rising internal demand for support and process guidance. To alleviate mounting human resources and IT strain, Audi launched its first AI-powered self-service assistant using Foundry that was deployed in just two weeks. The impact? Faster access to information, fewer routine queries, and more time for teams to focus on meaningful, high-value work. Audi’s example shows how AI doesn’t replace people but amplifies them.

The agentic era: What’s next?

Manufacturers are moving beyond task‑level automation toward a new operating model where AI works alongside teams to coordinate decisions, optimize workflows, and adapt to changing conditions in real time. This next era isn’t about experimenting on the margins, but about treating AI as a core capability that strengthens every part of the enterprise.

Platforms like Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Fabric, Foundry Models, and Microsoft 365 Copilot are already helping organizations make that shift. And the economic signal is strong. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study attributes the financial upside of the broader Industrial AI value stack to improvements across operations, productivity, and supply chain performance:

• Up to 457% projected ROI over three years

These gains compound as AI becomes embedded across the business, accelerating impact as intelligent systems take on more routine work, surface insights faster, and support teams in making better decisions at every stage of production. Manufacturers who fail to operationalize AI risk falling behind peers who are building intelligence directly into their processes, products, and customer experiences.

A practical path forward: How to get started

To fully realize this next chapter, manufacturers need a clear, actionable roadmap grounded in governed data, scalable AI systems, and measurable business outcomes.

Here’s a practical roadmap from aspiration to action:

• Identify high-impact use cases: Focus on areas like predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and quality control where AI can deliver quick, measurable wins.
• Define success metrics: Set clear key performance indicators (KPIs) to track ROI and impact across teams and facilities. What gets measured gets managed.
• Leverage proven platforms and partners: Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use established AI platforms like Azure and work with partners who understand both technology and manufacturing.
• Start small, scale fast: Begin with urgent, actionable business challenges. Build on proven frameworks and architect for scale. As Audi AG showed, operational AI can be deployed at enterprise scale in weeks, not years.
• Invest in data foundations: Migrating legacy systems to the cloud and breaking down data silos are essential. Unified, AI-ready data is the backbone of successful industrial AI initiatives.

Learn how industrial AI can transform your business

Industrial AI is no longer a vision for the future, but a proven source of measurable value today. The manufacturers pulling ahead are the ones building AI into how they operate, scale, and compete. Whether you’re laying the groundwork or accelerating existing initiatives, now is the moment to turn momentum into impact.

Return on Intelligence: Scaling Business Value with Industrial AI

Deeper insights, real-world case studies, and a practical roadmap

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¹ New Tech: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Artificial Intelligence Solutions For Industrial Transformation. Results are over three years for a composite organization based on interviewed and surveyed customers.

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Over the last decade, this end-to-end view, has been the promise of digital threads in the industrial space, a holy grail of data touchpoints that provide a real time view of the entire lifecycle of a product or a specific process, from design all the way to end of life. This has largely out of reach for most industrial companies for two key reasons:

1. The data problem: Fragmented, siloed, and uncontextualized mountains of data across a heterogenous stack of technologies and modalities, that require prohibitive investments in data science techniques to be able to leverage for a specific use case, with little scalability.
2. Return on investment (ROI): Traditionally, it has been difficult to prove ROI for digital thread initiatives, partly due to the challenges presented by the data problem, and partly because of the complexity to action on insights, from cultural resistance to skills gaps, to mention a few factors.

Microsoft, alongside partners like PTC, believe we are at the pivotal moment where digital threads are becoming an attainable reality for industrial customers due to two key innovations. First, the rise of unified data foundations that make data usable by securely sourcing it from systems like customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES), and automating the contextualization aligned to any given standard or custom data model.

Secondly, the rise of generative AI, specifically, AI agents that reason using this unified data foundation and provide insights or take actions—unlocking thousands of use cases across the manufacturing value chain.

The role of AI agents

AI agents are sophisticated software systems designed to automate complex analyses, support decision-making, and manage various processes. They are productivity enablers who can effectively incorporate humans in the loop through the use of multi-modality. These agents are designed to pursue complex goals with a high level of autonomy and predictability, taking goal-directed actions with minimal human oversight, making contextual decisions, and dynamically adjusting plans based on changing conditions. AI agents can assist in various business processes, such as optimizing workflows, retrieving information, and automating repetitive tasks. They can operate independently, dynamically plan, orchestrate other agents, learn, and escalate tasks when necessary, however, AI agents are only as good as the data used to train the models that power them, and the current landscape of AI agents in the industrial space is domain specific, so these agents are confined to exclusively operate within the constraints of a single data domain, for example a CRM agent or an MES agent.

A leading example of domain specific agent is PTC’s Codebeamer Copilot. The Codebeamer Copilot supports software development process for complex physical products, like software-defined vehicles. Codebeamer Copilot leverages the Codebeamer data graph, for a connected and comprehensive view into the product development process. From requirements management to testing to release, the Copilot provides rapid insight into key areas of application lifecycle management (ALM). The result is automated requirements handling, enhanced quality control, and boosted productivity due to drastically reducing the time it takes for engineers to write and validate requirements.

Application Lifecycle management is just the beginning. The AI-powered digital thread provides agents with the combined knowledge of the entire manufacturing data estate, with multiple domains: removing their previous limitations confining them to one function.

Real-world applications of AI-powered digital threads

The era of AI and digital threads has arrived, and it’s delivering real value for the world’s leading manufacturers today.

Schaeffler

A manufacturer of precision mobility components faced a need to modernize data management, as its data previously took days to decode. Their goal was clear: find a scalable solution to uncover factory insights faster. An agent was implemented to allow frontline workers to immediately uncover detailed information when faced with unexpected downtime. This allows operators to get the line running again faster, reducing costly delays in production.

Bridgestone

The world’s largest tire and rubber company leverages manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric to accelerate the productivity of their frontline workforce. As a private preview customer, in collaboration with a Microsoft partner, the company uses digital thread and AI technology to address key production challenges, like yield loss. The query system solution enables frontline workers, with various levels of experience, to easily interact with their factory data, and efficiently uncover insights to improve yield, and enhance quality.

Toyota O-Beya

Toyota is leveraging AI agents to harness the collective wisdom of its engineers and accelerate innovation. At its headquarters in Toyota City, the company has developed a system named “O-Beya,” which means “big room” in Japanese. This system consists of generative AI agents that store and share internal expertise, enabling the rapid development of new vehicle models. The O-Beya system currently includes nine AI agents, such as the Vibration Agent and Fuel Consumption Agent, which collaborate to provide comprehensive answers to engineering queries. This initiative is particularly crucial as many senior engineers are retiring, and the AI agents help preserve and transfer their knowledge to the next generation. Built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, the O-Beya system enhances efficiency and reduces development time.

The road ahead

The journey to fully realizing the potential of AI-powered digital threads involves phased implementation. Starting with identifying the right use cases aligned to business goals, where AI agents can play a role. Secondly, identify if the right data is available and in the right standards for usability. Lastly, quickly proving value by implementing a set of initial use cases with a minimum viable digital thread and measuring and socializing its results. Achieving the AI-powered digital thread with the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing capabilities:

• Azure adaptive cloud approach to source data from the edge, while supporting application modernization following cloud patterns.
• Partner applications as systems of records, like PTC Windchill.
• Microsoft first party manufacturing agents, like Factory Operations Agent in Azure AI Foundry, to unlock high-value factory use cases.
• Microsoft AI platforms like Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio to support development and orchestration of custom AI agents.
• Partner applications with agentic AI capabilities embedded, for example PTC ServiceMax AI.

Learn more

• Read the PTC whitepaper on AI-powered digital threads authored in partnership with Microsoft.
• Watch the Microsoft video series with Forrester and NVIDIA on AI-powered digital threads.
• Join us at Hannover Messe 2025 to see the AI-powered digital thread come to life.

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Ahead of the fair, we also published a new report in collaboration with MIT Technology Review Insights uncovering the current state and ambitions around AI in the manufacturing industry. The report clearly indicates that manufacturers are excited about the potential of AI and plan to make significant investments over the next two to three years to deploy AI at scale to unlock innovation and enhance efficiency.

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Transforming the manufacturing value chain with AI

The Microsoft experience focused on how AI transforms the manufacturing value chain: starting with accelerating product development cycles, improving efficiency in the factory, making operations more sustainable, and finally empowering every employee across business functions with the latest AI tools. These four opportunities manifested as the four distinct neighborhoods in the booth, with demos and customer stories populating each one.

1. Unlock innovation in design and engineering

AI has the potential to unlock a tremendous amount of innovation in design and engineering by allowing manufacturers to simulate and generate new options faster. It can help accelerate development cycles for new products and services as shown by our customers Kuka & Schneider Electric, how manufacturers can accelerate the programming of industrial robots and programmable logic controllers (PLCs) with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, significantly speeding up development times. Siemens, along with customer Harting, showcased how generative AI can be used to speed up the design process of new industrial connectors and revolutionize mass-customization. Additionally, our partners Threedy, PTC, Hexagon, Capgemini, and Ansys showcased how applying technologies from digital twins to mixed reality to the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing accelerates product development cycles.

2. Enable intelligent factories

Making factories smarter is top of mind for manufacturers. In this area of the booth, we showed customers how they can improve quality, resource utilization and accelerate issue resolution in the factory with industrial IoT, data, and AI. Along with our partners Accenture, Avanade, Sight Machine, Rockwell, and AVEVA, we showcased the manufacturing data solutions in Fabric (preview) and the Copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. These solutions help manufacturers unify their information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) data estates in an industry standard data model on Fabric. The Copilot template then uses this unified data to answer questions asked in natural language to help resolve issues on the factory floor. In addition, we showcased solutions from partners such as Tulip, TCS, SymphonyAI, SAP with Syntax, Cognite, Weavix, and Unmanned Life and from customers including Andritz, Chevron, Electrolux, and Ecopetrol that utilize Microsoft Azure IoT Operations, Azure private multi-access edge compute (MEC), Azure AI, Fabric, and more to enable intelligent factories.

3. Create resilient and sustainable operations

Manufacturing companies are looking to make their supply chain and service operations more resilient and sustainable. In this neighborhood we showed how they can achieve their goals using the power of cloud, AI, and mixed reality. In collaboration with Volvo Penta, we showed how using Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service and Guides improves technician training, service manager workflows, and eventually, delivers better customer outcomes for their marine engines. With Caterpillar, we showcased how their Service Information System built on Azure provides detailed service information for CAT products from 1977 up to today. We also showcased Microsoft Sustainability Manager, which helps organizations to record, report, and reduce their environmental impacts through the power of data and AI. Our partners Blue Yonder, O9, and Tools Group demonstrated the power of cloud and AI to make supply chains more resilient.

4. Enhance employee productivity with AI

AI has the potential to unlock productivity and innovation for employees in all areas of the business. In this area of the booth, we showcased how Microsoft Copilot in products such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Security, Microsoft Power Platform, Fabric, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Windows, and Bing on Surface devices can empower employees across business functions in the manufacturing enterprise to achieve more. We showcased how Microsoft Copilot for Security and Microsoft Defender for IoT empower security teams to protect their OT environments, bringing collaboration to the forefront by reducing knowledge barriers for securing such environments. In the Fabric demo, we showed how manufacturing customers can use the suite of analytics workloads in Fabric, Copilot in Fabric, and direct integration with generative AI models to transform their factory operations.

The BMW Group showcase was the connecting thread between each of the booth neighborhoods. Built in collaboration with Hexagon, NVIDIA, PTC, and Rockwell Automation, business leaders and dignitaries could experience how technology enables cutting-edge transformation through AI-assisted design, connected data, and agile production for organizations like BMW Group. Featured in the exclusive Hannover Messe press tour highlight, which hosted more than 40 international journalists, this demo garnered significant attention for depicting how the integration of technology is changing manufacturing as we know it.

Thought leadership and continued innovation

A space for thought leadership, the Microsoft theater was very busy this year, bringing together C-level leaders, innovators, and business leaders eager to learn about how technology is changing the sector, what their peers are doing, and the importance of diversity within manufacturing. This space connected customers to the experts: creating a unique forum of innovation where solutions to complex industrial problems were revealed, and where ideas were brought to life.

Covering topics from the return on investment (ROI) of 5G factories, to delivering practical insights for how exactly to build your own copilots, the theater sessions delivered valuable insights on the most pressing questions the industry faces today. Here are a few highlights of the theater sessions:

• Celebrating women in manufacturing brought together influential voices of women in manufacturing to explore their career journeys, achievements, challenges, and best leadership practices to inspire the next generation of female talent.
• Industrial transformation with AI: A discussion with Kraft and Schneider Electric shared how cloud, IoT, and mixed reality technologies together with AI are reshaping entire value chains.
• Microsoft partners, including IBM, PwC, Fractal, DXC, Honeywell, and Rescale spoke about how their solutions built with Microsoft technologies can help transform all aspects of manufacturing from design and engineering to the factory floor.
• Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award showcase, in partnership with Roland Berger, celebrated the winners of the fifth annual Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Awards (MIMA), a prestigious award recognizing innovation in digitalizing the manufacturing industry in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The award honors the most promising and innovative digital best practices from the industrial and operations sectors: production, purchasing, supply chain, engineering, and after sales. This year’s MIMA winners were Mercedes Benz, Northvolt, Malvern Paralytical, Wilo, Andritz, and Danfoss.

Learn more about solutions from Microsoft

Finally, we would like to thank our customers and partners who joined us at the booth as exhibitors, along with the thousands of attendees who visited the booth to engage with us and looking forward to Hannover Messe 2025. To learn more about the latest solutions for manufacturing, please visit Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing.

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This Ignite, the central topic was AI; how we are creating the most comprehensive cloud infrastructure for AI, how you can fuel solutions with all your data, including the Internet of Things (IoT) data, with Microsoft Fabric, and how Microsoft Copilots are empowering frontline workers with intuitive and conversational prompts to solve for challenges from onboarding to expert technical support.

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Microsoft Ignite product announcements

Data is the key to unlocking the potential of AI for manufacturing. Whether you want to optimize production processes based on data, improve product quality, increase worker safety, or drive new business models, you’ll need a unified data foundation that can feed your AI models and applications. However, building and managing such a data estate can be challenging, especially when your data sources are scattered across different systems, locations, and formats. During Microsoft Ignite we announced key products that will help manufacturers extract and integrate data from operations, leverage it for AI, and feed those AI solutions back to the factory floor to enable frontline workers.

We announced the public preview of Azure IoT Operations. This composable set of Azure Arc-enabled services helps organizations onboard assets, capture insights, and take actions to scale the digital transformation of physical operations. For customers in many industries, this ability to connect the physical world to the digital world is a foundational step in the digital transformation journey, providing access to new, rich sources of data that can help optimize business processes. For more information on the public preview and how organizations like Grupo Bimbo and EcoPetrol are already seeing benefits by using Azure IoT Operations, see the Tech Community post: Accelerating Industrial Transformation with Azure IoT Operations.

We also announced the general availability of Microsoft Fabric, a software as a service (SaaS)-based solution that offers a unified data foundation for analytics and insights, data access and governance, and creative AI experiences with Azure AI Studio integration. With this new solution, manufacturers can unify their data into a single estate, empowering engineering teams and operational leaders with self-service access to data analytics tools to uncover impactful operational insights and leverage data for machine learning and AI-enabled use cases across the value chain, closing the data gap between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT).

For more information on the Microsoft Fabric general availability announcement and how manufacturing organizations like Zeiss are leveraging it, see the post: Prepare your data for AI innovation with Microsoft Fabric—now generally available.

Lastly, we announced the Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides, which combines the power of generative AI with mixed reality to help frontline workers complete complex tasks and resolve issues faster with less disruption to the flow of work. The private preview is launching with a limited set of customers and capabilities. Designed to assist workers in industrial settings who deal with complex equipment and processes, mixed reality together with AI presents a human-first interface that promises to transform real-world operations. This copilot can assist industrial workers in real-time with speech and holograms. For more information on the private preview for Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides, its capabilities, and how to prepare for the public preview, see the blog post: Introducing Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides, bringing generative AI in mixed reality to frontline workers.

We cover these announcements in our exciting session titled The AI-era of Industrial Transformation, hosted by Kathleen Mitford. This 30-minute session covered how the industrial value chain is being reshaped by AI, cloud, and IoT solutions, and how organizations optimize their operations by extracting insights from information technology (IT), operational technology (OT), and engineering technology (ET) data. Manufacturers can use cloud-to-edge technologies to democratize access to this data with copilots and make better decisions, all while empowering frontline workers with mixed-reality applications.

Partner announcements

In Microsoft, we have a rich and robust ecosystem of partners who create products and end-to-end solutions on the leading edge of transformation. I’d like to highlight just a few here who announced offers to advance achieving value throughout the industrial value chain: 

• AVEVA Connect and Microsoft Fabric (announced October 2023). Aveva announced an expansion of its strategic collaboration with Microsoft to further strengthen both companies’ data integration platforms to better prepare customers to incorporate AI in key industries across the world. The agreement will see an even closer synergy between industrial cloud platform AVEVA Connect and data analytics solution Microsoft Fabric, which is currently in public preview. They are designed to streamline the process of collecting, transforming, and unifying data from various sources. 
• Siemens (announced October 25, 2023)—Siemens and Microsoft are deepening their partnership by bringing the benefits of generative AI to industries worldwide. As a first step, the companies are introducing Siemens Industrial Copilot, an AI-powered jointly developed assistant aimed at improving human-machine collaboration in manufacturing. In addition, the launch of the integration between Siemens Teamcenter software for product lifecycle management and Microsoft Teams will further pave the way to enabling the industrial metaverse. It will simplify virtual collaboration of design engineers, frontline workers, and other teams across business functions.
• Rockwell (announced October 26, 2023)—Rockwell and Microsoft announced an extension of their longstanding relationship to accelerate industrial automation design and development through generative AI. The companies are combining technologies to empower the workforce and accelerate time-to-market for customers building industrial automation systems.
• Schneider Electric (announced November 13, 2023) is driving Generative AI productivity and sustainability solutions by integrating Microsoft Azure OpenAI. Building on the foundations of a long-standing collaboration with Microsoft, Schneider Electric is developing solutions that leverage algorithms to generate text, code, and other types of content. This has empowered the company to reimagine its approach to various operational processes, streamlining time-consuming tasks, optimizing resource allocation, and gaining speed and efficiency. At the same time, Schneider Electric continues to apply generative AI to advance innovation in its offer portfolio.
• SymphonyAI’s Industrial LLM (announced November 16, 2023)—Was launched to advance predictive and generative AI capabilities for manufacturers. Developed in partnership with Microsoft, it harnesses the power of Azure services to ensure robust security, data protection, and scalability, addressing essential enterprise needs. Tailored specifically for manufacturing environments, the Industrial LLM from SymphonyAI is built and trained on an extensive, industry-specific dataset that equips the LLM to swiftly generate actionable insights, significantly enhancing operational efficiency and adeptly tackling complex queries.

Advancing your industrial transformation strategy

We are at a unique moment of change and convergence with data and AI becoming more accessible and fundamentally changing our relationship with products, processes, and places. This integration of digital and physical technologies presents a big opportunity to reinvent the entire value chain:

• The vast amount of data and digital feedback loops from both consumers and connected products allows us to use AI-driven product design to deliver on individualized customer needs, enhancing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
• In the factory, continuous monitoring of assets through sensors and data analysis helps workers anticipate maintenance needs to reduce unplanned downtime, enhancing asset reliability.
• AI-optimized supply chains monitor pricing changes from suppliers, dynamically dispatch materials to meet production needs, and prioritize customer shipments based on fulfillment penalties.

Microsoft is collaborating with top manufacturers to help them manage this convergence and optimize their data with our range of AI tools, and we are keen to assist you with your strategy as well. To learn more about these announcements and other key Microsoft Ignite moments review the on-demand sessions.

The post Microsoft Ignite 2023: Innovative technologies to accelerate industrial transformation appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Microsoft at Hannover Messe 2023

Our customers and partners joined the Microsoft team of manufacturing experts to showcase co-innovation and demonstrate how we are working together to manufacture a more resilient and sustainable future. During this week-long event, we showcased demos, held customer meetings and innovation workshops, thought leadership panels, social hours, and partnership announcements. Take a look at this brief highlight video.

On this edition, we had 36 demos in our booth, many of them led by our partners and customers, addressing how together we are helping manufacturers achieve their top goals of unlocking innovation, creating resilient supply chains, enabling intelligent factories, and modernizing sales and services.

• Unlock innovation: Engineer new business value using industrial metaverse technologies like AI, mixed reality, digital twins, simulation, and cloud computing, come together to deliver sustainable products and services.
• Create resilient supply chains: Create sustainable, agile, and collaborative supply chains that improve visibility and resilience.
• Enable intelligent factories: Operate the safe, secure, and agile factory of the future today, with information technology (IT), operational technology (OT), industrial Internet of Things (IoT), and AI.
• Modernize digital sales and services: Modernize customer experiences across marketing, sales, and service channels.

From all these demos, there were two overarching topics that captured unprecedented attention from the attendees, AI and the industrial metaverse. We were honored to see several of our partners like Bosch, Siemens, and Sight Machine displaying solution integrations with Azure OpenAI Service, to leverage the power of generative AI for use cases like; programming machines with large language models or analyzing unstructured machine data to generate production reports in seconds. On the supply chain side, we saw how several of our customers like Kraft Heinz leverages AI embedded on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot to proactively mitigate supply chain risk, and how Northvolt could use Dynamics 365 Copilot to perform asset maintenance to ensure all day uptime of their factories to meet their customer demand.

It was also incredible to feel the excitement around the industrial metaverse at the booth, our customers, like e.GO Mobile AG and Kawasaki Heavy Industries demonstrated how they are leveraging Microsoft technologies—like mixed reality and digital twins—to enable frontline workers and optimize factory processes and realize industrial metaverse outcomes.

Accelerate digital transformation with customers and partners

In addition to demos, we met with hundreds of customers during the conference, having discussions on how Microsoft can help them accelerate their digital transformation and achieve business outcomes faster. Microsoft presence at the event garnered an incredible media response, notably several news channel interviews with Marianne Janik, CEO, Microsoft Germany. Microsoft also reinforced at the event its recently announced partnerships with Siemens on Teamcenter and Microsoft Teams integration to leverage AI, and with NVIDIA to connect their Omniverse Platform to Microsoft 365 applications.

In our dedicated gallery space, we hosted several thought leadership sessions covering pressing topics for the industry, like the need to accelerate resiliency in the supply chain, adopting the industrial metaverse as part of your technology roadmap, and opportunities and challenges for women in manufacturing. Session details:

• Supply chain reimagined: Showcased along with Accenture Avanade, practical ways supply chain teams can create co-pilot experiences with AI to improve productivity in partnership with Accenture Avanade.
• Realizing a new era of industrial digitalization: Panel conversation that explored how our customers BMW and WPP are leveraging industrial metaverse technologies today and why they are excited for the possibilities that NVIDIA’s Omniverse on Azure enables.
• Women in manufacturing: Panel conversation formed by executives from Microsoft, SAP, Hexagon, and Avanade, to discuss the opportunities and challenges women in manufacturing face today.

We want to thank all the customers and partners who joined us at the booth as exhibitors, and the thousands of attendees who came by to engage with us.

Learn more

Follow us on social and visit our website to stay informed about Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and learn how you can help manufacture a more resilient and sustainable future. We look forward to seeing you at Hannover Messe 2024 or connecting with you through hybrid or on-demand experiences.

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More about Hannover Messe 2023 from the organizers:

Hannover Messe 2023 shows the difference that exhibiting companies can make, the changes they are driving, and the innovations they are developing—on the way to a smart, energy-efficient, and sustainable industry. Hannover Messe 2023’s lead theme, Industrial Transformation—Making the Difference, reflects this. From digitalized manufacturing processes to hydrogen-operated production plants and carbon reduction software, Hannover Messe 2023 paints a complete picture of the technological possibilities for the industry of today and tomorrow.

As the world’s leading trade fair for industrial technology, Hannover Messe picks up on the current trends and provides everyone involved with orientation in times of energy shortages, climate change, and supply chain problems. How do you install intelligent energy management and thus create an environment for CO2-neutral production? What are the latest developments surrounding Industry 4.0 and AI? And how about the mega-topic, hydrogen?

Hannover Messe features all relevant industry topics—at the exhibits, at the forums, and in dialogue with experts from all over the world. From drive and fluid technology to digital platforms and IT security to industrial internet and robotics, the huge variety reflects the manufacturing industry’s broad scope and provides important economic and social impulses every year.

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