Pressure on the Industry to Innovate - Industrial AI Agents at Hannover Messe 2025
- Dinos Papakostas
- Apr 17
- 4 min read
The industry is facing an urgent wake-up call: according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), a lack of AI strategy is rapidly becoming a critical threat to competitiveness. As the FAZ starkly put it in their recent article, "The Lack of an AI Strategy in Industry is Becoming a Problem" (translated; available online here). FAZ underscores a core theme, which echoed throughout Hannover Messe 2025: strategic partnerships are crucial for fast-tracking impactful AI-driven transformation across industry sectors.
Backing FAZ's push for strategic partnerships, our Hannover Messe presentation provided a concrete example of this in action, which will be described in-depth in this article. We showcased how our collaboration is helping industrial giant Festo become "fit for the AI era" (a transformation noted in our FAZ feature), illustrating the very startup-corporation synergy the FAZ identified as crucial. Our discussions with major players like Siemens and Beckhoff showed the momentum behind applied AI. They shared insights into their operational AI agents, which are currently adding substantial, tangible value to their production environments daily. We will explore specific examples in this article.
Festo & Zeta Alpha at the Hannover Messe
Collaborating to Deploy AI Solutions - A Case Study
The Challenge: Handling Complexity in Industrial Automation
Festo, a global leader in automation solutions, is known for its incredibly broad product portfolio - more than 40.000 catalog products, amounting to trillions of possible configurations. To support customers in effectively accessing and using the detailed technical information required, Festo recognized a significant challenge: How could it make precise and relevant product data instantly accessible to customers while ensuring the accuracy and reliability expected by industry clients?
A Practical Solution: The Festo Virtual Assistant
To tackle this, Festo partnered with us through TechFounders, an accelerator program based in Munich. Working closely together, we introduced the "Festo Virtual Assistant", a generative AI solution integrating state-of-the-art AI models to provide reliable, document-based responses.
Unlike general-purpose language models that lack access to private and internal data, the Feso Virtual Assistant uses our infrastructure and services to perform retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). This enables it to query internal product documentation securely and effectively, providing customers with answers grounded directly in internal sources and linked explicitly to the original documentation for easy verification.
For example, users of the system can now ask sophisticated, highly specific queries like:
"What type of electric actuator from Festo should I use to move a metal object weighing 1 kilogram for 10 centimeters?" and “How is the MUC mounting accessory installed?”
Beyond Prototyping: Accelerating AI Adoption and Deployment
One of the main challenges companies face today is the uptake of AI solutions beyond the PoC phase, especially for expertise-driven organizations subject to a high degree of domain knowledge. By collaborating with Zeta Alpha, Festo transitioned from the initial prototype to deployment in production rapidly, achieving a velocity exceptional even within the agile startup environment.
Recognizing the power of this first solution, Festo extended this use case internally across multiple departments. Since the Festo Virtual Assistant, we have deployed and scaled several additional AI use cases, from HR, compliance, and legal services to business process management, while relying on the flexible data ingestion and production-ready capabilities our platform offers. Next to their other facilities, Festo officially opened an AI factory as well.
If you want to learn more about our collaboration with Festo and our key learnings and takeaways from this partnership, watch the recording of our 15-minute talk from Hannover Messe:
An Industrial Copilot and Intelligent Agent Suites
Insights from Siemens and Beckhoff Automation
As the FAZ rightly points out, having an AI strategy is no longer optional; it's essential for competitiveness, a fact Siemens realized quickly as well. In conversation with Boris Scharinger, Senior Innovation Manager and Technology Strategist at Siemens, he explained Siemens’ AI flagship project, the Industrial Copilot for Engineering, which earned them the prestigious Hermes Award during the Hannover Messe. The Industrial Copilot for Engineering empowers automation engineers by significantly streamlining the process of designing and implementing automation for manufacturing operations, covering PLC code, HMI design, robotics integration, motion control, wiring diagrams, and networking configurations.
Its uniqueness lies largely in how it addresses the specific constraints of industrial engineering. Consumer-grade AI solutions, however impressive, typically operate probabilistically: they offer generalized answers that may vary over time as underlying models change. In contrast, industrial engineers demand deterministic, repeatable outputs. According to Boris, production environments simply can't function without absolute predictability, famously stating, "Production doesn't have an undo button".
Having a long history in integrating automation solutions, particularly around IPC-based control architectures, integrating AI to accelerate industrial engineering workflows was a no-brainer for Beckhoff Automation. We spoke with Jannis Doppmeier about their latest innovation, the TwinCAT CoAgent, which isn't just one AI assistant, but rather a suite comprised of multiple specialized agents that handle specific parts of the automation development process. The CoAgent follows an agentic RAG approach where, unlike conventional coding assistants that are prompted to generate code snippets, their AI agents are equipped with tools and workflows to iteratively refine searches and retrieve relevant data, allowing complex configurations to be built step-by-step.
Initial feedback from internal testing as well as pilot deployments with machine builders is particularly promising, showing productivity increases ranging from 20 to 30%. CoAgent assists skilled software engineers, often under strict time constraints, in delivering their automation projects more efficiently. Given Europe's current talent shortage, these figures are especially meaningful, enabling companies to make the most of limited engineering talent.
Hannover Messe 2025 wasn't just a showcase of technology; it was a clear signal that AI Agents are moving to practical application in the industry. The examples from Festo, Siemens, and Beckhoff demonstrate the diverse ways AI Agents are being deployed to solve real-world challenges, improve efficiency, and drive innovation. Next to these use cases, we are proud to be recognized in the FAZ for showcasing success in bringing 'Deep Research' capabilities, a method with AI agents for sophisticated, multi-step research and analysis on complex industrial data, to the industry during Hannover Messe 2025.
If you are interested in learning more or brainstorming how industrial agents can add value to your company, don’t hesitate to contact us.
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