Siemens and Microsoft have joined forces to leverage the collaborative potential of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in enhancing innovation and efficiency across the entire product lifecycle, from design to operational management. The companies are integrating Siemens’ Teamcenter® software for product lifecycle management (PLM) with Microsoft’s collaboration platform Teams and Azure OpenAI Service language models, as well as other Azure AI capabilities. This collaboration will be demonstrated at Hannover Messe, where the two tech leaders will showcase how generative AI can enhance factory automation and operations through AI-powered software development, problem reporting and visual quality inspection.

Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Cloud + AI, Scott Guthrie, stated that “The integration of AI into technology platforms will profoundly change how we work and how every business operates,” adding that “with Siemens, we are bringing the power of AI to more industrial organizations, enabling them to simplify workflows, overcome silos, and collaborate in more inclusive ways to accelerate customer-centric innovation.”

Through the new Teamcenter app for Microsoft Teams, which is expected to launch later in 2023, design engineers, frontline workers, and teams across business functions will be able to communicate and collaborate more effectively, closing feedback loops faster and solving challenges together. Service engineers and production operatives will be able to use mobile devices to document and report product design or quality concerns using natural speech, and Azure OpenAI Service will parse that informal speech data, creating a summarized report and routing it to the appropriate design, engineering, or manufacturing expert. Workers can record their observations in their preferred languages, which will then be translated into the official company language with Microsoft Azure AI. The app will enable millions of workers who do not have access to PLM tools today to impact the design and manufacturing process more easily as part of their existing workflows.

Siemens and Microsoft are also collaborating to help software developers and automation engineers accelerate the code generation for Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), which control most machines across the world’s factories. At Hannover Messe, the companies will demonstrate a concept for how OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other Azure AI services can augment Siemens’ industrial automation engineering solutions, significantly reducing time and the probability of errors by generating PLC code through natural language inputs.

This collaboration is part of the longstanding strategic relationship between Siemens and Microsoft, which has been built on over 35 years of joint innovation with thousands of customers. Other areas of collaboration include Senseye on Azure, enabling companies to run predictive maintenance at enterprise scale and support for customers that seek to host their business applications in the Microsoft Cloud to run solutions from the Siemens Xcelerator open digital business platform, including Teamcenter, on Azure. Siemens is also partnering with Microsoft as part of its zero trust strategy.