Siemens executive Dale Tutt shares his predictions and advice for the year ahead—including how generative AI is evolutionary for the engineering profession.
Siemens has sponsored this post.
Digital transformation has been a source of opportunity for a while now—it’s not as if the computer was just invented. Many engineering organizations have already made large strides toward implementing digital tools and workflows.
And yet, as we head into 2024, it feels like there’s never been a more exciting time to pursue new technologies and ways of working. To discuss what the year ahead could look like for companies willing to innovate, we sat down with Dale Tutt, vice president of industry strategy for Siemens Digital Industries Software.
A believer in having an appetite for change, Tutt shared his thoughts on what companies can do to stay ahead of the digital transformation curve in 2024. He spoke of the most pressing challenges organizations face today, the most exciting digital technologies (yes, AI made the list) and how engineers are using digital tools to thrive in a competitive global marketplace.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Engineering.com: The pandemic lit a fire for digital transformation at many organizations. Do you think that fire is still burning now that COVID is behind us?
Dale Tutt: We saw and continue to see a lot of digital transformation and companies moving down their digitalization path. Our customers that had made the transformation were better at adapting to the new normal. They could go visit a supplier virtually, even if they were doing a source inspection. With the supply chain disruptions that were going on at that point in time, they were able in some cases to predict that they were going to have a disruption and start to make adjustments accordingly. The companies where you saw a lot of digital transformation were the ones that really excelled.
As we moved forward in the pandemic, we continued to see disruptions in the supply chain. Sometimes from lockdowns, but then there were big disruptions such as what happened in the chips. Even then, the companies that were already down this path where they were adopting more digital solutions, they just kept on going and were looking at how to bring in automation, how to manage their workflows more efficiently. A lot of companies continue to struggle with workforce issues. They need more electronics, software and systems engineers. As the products have shifted to being smarter and more connected, there’s more demand for these specialized engineering fields around systems and software engineering.
I think as we look forward, we will continue to see supply chain disruptions. Maybe not as bad as they were two years ago with the big chip shortages. But with some of the geopolitical conflicts, you’ll continue to see these supply chain disruptions and the workforce transition issues.
Can continuing digital transformation help solve those challenges?
Companies are starting to fill the gap with digital. They’re going to use digital to fill the roles that they can’t fill with real people. They are using the digital twin to automate workflows, to have a better understanding of how their products are going to perform once they get in the field, to reduce the amount of testing they have to do to get the product ready to go. They are using digital to solve everyday problems. They are seeing the benefits of it and they continue to seek more digital solutions that they can adopt.
Digital transformation is not only helping improve these situations, but also it is also helping with risk mitigation, whether it is from supply chain disruption or another unforeseen market disruption, because they are able to look at more “what if” scenarios and explore more options. They are seeing the direct digital benefits such as using less energy, or indirect benefits such as being able to do a better job of understanding what might happen in the future to make a better, more informed decision and improve the overall business viability. Digital transformation is not just surviving, but really figuring out how you can thrive and be more successful in the future.
How will artificial intelligence (AI) fit into digital transformation in 2024?
When we think about how companies have used digital transformation, at first they were just starting to digitize things and connect a few things together, but it was still kind of immature. But as they move beyond just that connectedness and start to do more automation of their workflows, they are starting to do more generative solutions. Whether it is generative engineering or generative manufacturing, these are processes where companies are trying to optimize their manufacturing processes or optimize their supply chain. And I think we’re starting to see that start to transform now with AI.
Many of Siemens’ solutions for optimization already have machine learning and artificial intelligence in them. For example, we use part classification and command predictions, which learns from how a user works and then starts to make suggestions on what to do next. If the last 17 times a person did this, they then did these next three commands, it starts to recommend those commands. That’s functionality that has been incorporated in many solutions today.
I feel like AI is where we have been heading, but it feels evolutionary to me, not revolutionary. If I’m doing systems engineering and I’ve got to trace requirements to the design and the analysis so that I can close the loop on designing a new product, we’ve always been trying to automate that process. The goal is to have engineers focused on solving problems, not wasting time on mundane tasks.
As the technology has continued to evolve, now we are able to start using AI to make some of those predictions and make those recommendations in a way that puts that work behind the engineer and lets them focus on solving those more complex problems. Using generative engineering to help optimize subsystems or even larger scale systems or vehicles, I do believe it is going to be a game changer. It does seem evolutionary and, taking a bigger perspective on it, it is going to be critical for digital transformation in the future to get to that true closed loop optimization process for these designs to make manufacturing processes faster.
What other technologies do you think engineers should pay attention to in 2024?
For our customers there is still a lot of interest in the industrial metaverse, the ability for high end visualization of systems in real time. And with the cloud computing that we now have at our fingertips, manufacturers have the ability to scale up, if they are performing a higher end simulation and scale down if they just need the visualizations. This environment is available to them full time and they are able to interact with it in a very immersive way. Whether it is through virtual reality, augmented reality, if it is on a desktop, or whatever mechanism that a person is using, it is a much more immersive technology. We now are able to view things differently whether it is the design of a product or at the simulations of how that product will perform.
In addition to the metaverse, I think we’re still going to see growth in some of the manufacturing technologies like additive manufacturing. It’s something that we’ve talked about for several years now, but it continues to get better and better, and I think the economics of it are continuing to improve. For example, we are all thinking about sustainability and carbon footprint, and with additive, parts wouldn’t need to be shipped all over the world. Instead, they could be printed in certain centers to reduce the carbon footprint that it takes to move them around.
I also think that we are going to see more emphasis on some of the supply chain solutions and understanding the sustainability footprint. I sometimes call it the digital twin of the supply chain, which can provide a more complete understanding of a company’s supplier network and where their parts are sourced. It is not necessarily a pure digital technology, but it is a critical process that is enabled by more digital technology, and the digital twin and digital thread. If that information is available, a company is able to look at it and analyze it differently, and by applying some artificial intelligence to the data analytics, a company can get actionable insights into how to better manage its supply chain and make preparations and/or adjustments for possible future disruptions.
Those are some of the big areas I see in the coming year for where we are going to continue to see digital really making a difference for people and companies.
What advice do you have for companies planning their digital transformation strategy in 2024?
We talked about AI being used to develop new products, but it can also be used when training new people on how the work has been done in the past, enhancing how we train the next generation. Again, it’s different ways of using digital and AI to help solve some of the workforce challenges. I talked a lot about how we are closing the gaps. Part of closing the gap is bringing people up to speed faster and shortening the learning curve. There are opportunities to do that.
I think companies that continue to adopt digital transformation are going to continue to be the ones that are able to adapt the fastest. We have no idea what the next disruption is. COVID happened just like that. All of the sudden we don’t have any electronics chips, or there’s a ship stuck in the Suez Canal. These things happen.
As companies think about how they are structuring themselves to manage those risks, the ones that have the transparency and insights that can only be provided with a comprehensive digital twin that crosses their products, their manufacturing processes, all the way into their supply chain, they are the ones that are going to be able to move faster, be more resilient and thrive in the face of whatever disruption might be coming next.
To learn more about digital solutions for engineers, visit Siemens Digital Industries Software.