Siemens CEO Talks AI, Automation, and Managing 320K Employees
Roland Busch opens up on 170 years of industrial evolution and how Siemens is augmenting LLMs for manufacturing.
Siemens CEO Roland Busch sat down with The Verge for a wide-ranging interview covering the German industrial giant's past, present, and AI-powered future.
The company, now 170+ years old, employs a staggering 320,000 people globally. Busch discussed the challenges of steering that massive workforce while pushing hard into automation and US manufacturing investments.
Most interesting: Siemens isn't just adopting large language models—they're augmenting them. The company is exploring how to layer LLMs with domain-specific industrial knowledge to make AI actually useful on factory floors.
It's a reminder that while Silicon Valley obsesses over chatbots, the real AI money might be in making machines talk to other machines. Siemens has been doing automation longer than most tech companies have existed.