Hannover Messe 2026 – Industrial AI between business value, tech advancements, and hype

The discussions about AI for industrial use cases at Hannover Messe 2026 were centered around three questions: Where is the concrete business value today, what comes next, and what is overhyped? Here is our perspective:

Physical AI between hype and reality – As expected, humanoid robots were basically omnipresent at Hannover Messe. While many companies are still riding the hype around this topic, more and more presentations we saw at the fair also talked about the technology’s limitations. Limitations like safety and security, reliability, and ROI became more relevant this year, as more companies can talk about their own experiences. In this context, I would like to especially thank the Fraunhofer Institute for their contribution to grounding these discussions. Don’t get me wrong – PAC believes in the potential of mobile manipulators, but humanoids are still in the early stages and have yet to prove their value against other form factors. In the coming years, we will see more mobile manipulators on wheels deployed in warehouses and on shop floors, but not necessarily humanoids.

GenAI-based industrial solutions are becoming more value-focused and independent from AI models – In 2025, Siemens won the prestigious Hermes Award at Hannover Messe for its growing portfolio of Industrial Copilots (for engineering, planning, design, operations, and services). In 2026, it was interesting to see that no one was talking about this offering anymore. Instead, Siemens announced the Eigen Engineering Agent, a new GenAI-based assistant for automation engineering with PLC code development and testing capabilities. There are two main reasons for the branding shift from Industrial Copilot to Eigen, in our opinion. First, the engineering-related GenAI use case became priority number 1 for Siemens, as the other GenAI-based Industrial Copilots delivered only limited value. Similar to software development in the IT world, this use case provides the most concrete value to customers through clear productivity gains and supports solid monetization for Siemens (price of Eigen: EUR 1,800 per user annually). Second, Siemens is becoming more flexible in using underlying AI models. While the Industrial Copilots from Siemens were based on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Services, Eigen uses different models in the background, and Siemens no longer discloses which ones. This makes the Eigen offering more independent from individual AI models but also less transparent.

Agentic AI orchestration platforms for industry-specific use cases are emerging – At Hannover Messe 2026, companies started to present their agentic AI orchestration platforms for industrial purposes. One example was Infor, which displayed its Agentic Orchestrator, an infrastructure layer that enables Industry AI Agents to move from isolated tasks to coordinated workflows, centered around Infor’s cloud-based ERP platform for the manufacturing industry. Another example was Contact Software, which showcased Fourier AI, a new intelligent layer for its application portfolio around PLM, MES, and IoT. Fourier AI combines LLMs from different vendors with specialized AI models from CONTACT Software (e.g., for multi-modal similarity search of 3D models). In addition, an orchestration service in the Fourier Cloud analyzes incoming requests and selects the best models to answer the query.

No discernible progress in industrial foundation models – At Hannover Messe 2025, Alep Alpha presented its Pharia industrial suite, a sovereign foundation model for industrial engineering processes. That same year, Siemens confirmed that it was working on this topic together with Microsoft. Later in the year, Siemens launched an alliance with companies like Grob, Trumpf, Chiron, Renishaw, Heller, and the Voith Group for a systematic exchange of engineering, manufacturing, and machine data that will be used to develop the Siemens Industrial Foundation Model. At Hannover Messe 2026, nobody talked about industrial foundation models anymore, which makes us think that the initial hype around this topic has dissipated. It looks like the limited value and willingness of sharing data between companies makes it difficult to further evolve in this direction. In addition, during the week of Hannover Messe 2026, the Canadian AI firm Cohere agreed to buy the German tech ‌start-up Alep Alpha to increase its sales capabilities to government and business customers in highly regulated European markets. This happened after a lot of turmoil around Alep Alpha in the last 12 months. The company failed to deliver sufficient AI-based business value to customers. It remains to be seen if Cohere will be more successful in this space.