At Siemens’ Realize LIVE APAC 2026 in Bangalore, which recorded 60-percent year-on-year attendance growth, the spotlight was firmly on how AI and digital twins are reshaping the way complex products are conceived, built and operated.
On Day 2 of the two-day event, Joe Bohman, executive vice president of PLM Products at Siemens Digital Industries Software (Siemens DISW), said, “Everything for us starts with our strategy. You heard Tony talk about this yesterday – comprehensive digital twin.
“Comprehensive is so important: mechanical, electrical, electronic, software, engineering, manufacturing, operations, lifecycle intelligence. Hopefully, you’re getting the fact that we’re putting AI into everything that we do, and [making it] adaptive.”
At the heart of this vision is Intelligence Center X, Siemens’ new data and AI platform, positioned as the critical layer connecting engineering, manufacturing and enterprise systems into a single intelligent fabric.
According to Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens DISW, analysts have told him that Siemens has “created a new category” by addressing the cross-system engineering and manufacturing data challenge.
Gartner had also named Siemens as the company to beat when it comes to manufacturing AI,
Manufacturing AI
Siemens has what the industry may regard as a complete, connected engineering-to-operations stack. This supports much more than a chatbot that generates answers to queries.
It offers a credible route from AI recommendations to a physics-validated design change or an executable production action, with AI woven throughout the workflow.
Joe stressed that Siemens’ approach to digital twins is comprehensive, spanning multiple domains and covering the full product lifecycle rather than a single discipline. This includes Siemens products such as Teamcenter, Simcenter and others.
“We’ve put our team [of products] together with a lot of investment. You see the number over there – over EUR25 billion in investment putting our team together. You see all the great pieces. This is what it takes to build a comprehensive digital twin.”
Another new product, Digital Twin Composer, was also introduced on stage through an example involving Foxconn’s AI data-centre operations. Siemens had been asked to help optimise a constrained factory testing room for material flow and throughput. Digital Twin Composer can model the wider factory and, using built-in AI capabilities, explore many layout options to identify the best configuration for flow and throughput within space constraints.
It does this by bringing together digital models, real factory data, AI and 3D visualisation.
You see the number over there – over EUR25 billion in investment putting our team together. You see all the great pieces. This is what it takes to build a comprehensive digital twin.Joe Bohman
Digital Twin Composer combines digital data from tools such as Teamcenter and Opcenter with real-world operational data. According to Joe, it is “infused with the NVIDIA Omniverse technology”, enabling highly realistic, real-time 3D digital twins.
Joe said that around 300 customers had approached Siemens about using Digital Twin Composer, which is designed to help them build and operate context-rich, AI-powered 3D factory digital twins with optimisation in mind.
A new category
Joe echoed Siemens DISW’s CEO in saying that European analysts had congratulated the company on solving a real problem and, in the process, creating a new solution category.
The platform is positioned as more than a standalone data platform or point AI application.
It combines pre-built ontologies that model relationships among entities and data using shared meaning; a massively scalable graph database; an AI foundation supporting leading LLMs; and the Mendix low-code development platform. It also includes Graph Studio for graph and semantic-data capabilities, as well as AI Studio for machine-learning capabilities.
On top of that, it connects with enterprise systems and data platforms, including PLM, ERP, CRM, Snowflake, Databricks and Palantir.
This makes Intelligence Center X a potentially powerful industrial-AI orchestration layer, enabling companies to build AI agents that operate with context, governance and traceability across the broader Siemens portfolio – or, as Bohman described it, the Siemens “team.”
(This journalist was invited by Siemens DISW to attend this event in Bangalore, India)