Business Lab

Ask Stefan Jockusch about what a factory might look like in 10 or 20 years, and the answer might leave you at a crossroads between fascination and bewilderment. Jockusch is vice president for strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software, which develops applications that simulates the conception, design, and manufacture of products such as a cell phone or a smart watch. His vision of a smart factory is abuzz with “independent, moving” robots. But they don’t stop at making one or three or five things. No—this factory is “self-organizing.” “Depending on what product I throw at this factory, it will completely reshuffle itself and work differently when I come in with a very different product,” Jockusch says. “It will self-organize itself to do something different.” Behind this factory of future is artificial intelligence (AI), Jockusch says in this episode of Business Lab. But AI starts much, much smaller, with the chip. Take automaking. The chips that power the various applications in cars today—and the drive