Last week, I joined 127,000 of our closest friends in Germany for the Hannover Messe trade fair, which once again showcased all that’s new and interesting in the smart manufacturing world. Events like this always exist in a bit of a bubble, but the reality gap between lovely spring sunshine, beautiful cherry blossoms, and breathless AI boosterism inside the showground and tariffs, uncertainty, and lengthening sales cycles outside felt particularly wide this year.

A Boston Dynamics robotic dog, photographed at the Hannover Messe trade show

 

So What Did We See?

  • Robots everywhere. Big and small, fixed and mobile, wheeled and legged: In some halls, utilitarian autonomous mobile robots were the point, and prospective buyers dug deeply into questions of carrying capacity, connectivity, range, and fleet management. Elsewhere, the flash of a robot leg (or four) drew crowds to the booths of the Bundeswehr (Germany’s army), Siemens, and other giants of the industrial world. In line with Forrester’s prediction, humanoid robots were a rarer beast. In a week of searching, I saw two (from Unitree and Sanctuary AI), and only one (Unitree’s G1) had legs. Forrester’s advice, to focus on the use case rather than the form factor, remains as relevant as ever.
  • AI everywhere, too. Last year, I commented that “everyone had an AI story, even if few made much sense.” There was still plenty of that in 2025, but I also saw some evidence that AI was being put to practical use. Almost everyone had a chatbot to show, and some of them were quite clever. PTC showed a nice enrichment of the CodeBeamer asset lifecycle management application, using Microsoft’s AI tools to reduce ambiguity and contradiction in formal statements of requirements during product design and manufacture. Siemens enriched its existing AI offerings with a new industrial foundation model, trained on domain-specific concepts and able to process engineering diagrams as well as the text and images that more general-purpose tools manipulate.
  • Embodied or physical AI. Interesting things happen when robots and AI get together, and some early indications of that were also on show. Sanctuary AI’s humanoid robot on the Microsoft booth might have been legless, but it had very clever hands and an impressive ability to respond to its environment. A small robotic arm on the TCS booth looked much like all the other robotic arms at the show, except for the scrawled signature of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. Behind the scenes, his company’s Cosmos model helped the TCS team train the arm to cope with a wide set of situations. I’ll be diving more deeply into both in some embodied or physical AI research this year.
  • Virtual PLCs. Audi, Intel, and Siemens have all been talking about different aspects of a project to virtualize line-side programmable logic controllers (PLCs) for several years, but industry conservatism, network latency, the control loop, and an engineer’s understandable desire to see — and touch — the little box of tricks responsible for keeping their multimillion-Euro industrial process moving smoothly conspire to slow the virtualization of operational technology workflows. Audi and Siemens have taken the solution into production, with Audi’s car body assembly line in Neckarsulm now controlled by virtual PLCs (TÜV-certified as fail-safe) installed on standard IT infrastructure in a data center 10 kilometers from the plant. According to Siemens, a further 40 customers are evaluating the solution.
  • Unified namespace. The unified namespace (or UNS) was mentioned at a lot of booths this year, but it’s a term that risks becoming too diluted to be useful. Some (like Automation, HiveMQ, Litmus, and Sight Machine) mostly used the term in the pure sense originally intended by Walker Reynolds. Others were less precise and really just talked about pouring data from different systems into a single data lake: There’s not much unification happening there! Both can be useful, but the extra work to add context, semantics, and structure provides the real differentiation that makes a true UNS special.
  • More data hubs and fabrics. We talk about the digital industrial platform at Forrester (new report on the topic coming very soon), and one important aspect of this is providing a way to more easily share data across application, organization, or workflow silos. There’s some overlap with the UNS, but we also see vendors offering their own software solutions. Autodesk Forge, AVEVA Connect, Hexagon Nexus, and others are addressing this challenge, and new options like GE Vernova’s Proficy Data Hub and HiveMQ’s Pulse were being promoted at the show and should be generally available later this year.
  • Merck combines physical and digital to improve quality and traceability. It’s a pretty specific use case, but it popped up on at least two stands. Merck launched the M-Trust “cyber-physical trust platform” at CES in January, which ties digital product information to specific attributes of a unique physical product such as specific pigments embedded in the ink used to print its label. There’s a lot to explore here in terms of ensuring trust and authenticity up and down the supply chain and making the solution cost-effective for cheaper products. But integrations like those on show in Hannover help: On the Zebra stand, the special reader required to spot inclusions in ink and paint was embedded into a regular Zebra handheld scanner, and Siemens Merck showcased the SmartFacturing Studio that supports modular production of pharmaceuticals with a lot of help from Siemens hardware, software, and the Xcelerator platform. This touches on some similar ideas to the digital product passport, which I also saw good examples of and will be exploring in more depth in a report later this year.
  • Oh, Canada! There’s usually a partner country at Hannover Messe. They’re selected months ahead of the show and normally don’t make that much of an impression after some of their senior politicians, diplomats, or executives say worthy things at the launch press conference. This year’s choice, Canada, was fortuitous and well placed to connect with broader concerns around tariffs and geopolitics. Canadian startups, companies, and high school robotics teams made the most of the opportunity to show their capabilities and some of the ways they differ from their neighbors to the south. Canadian red and white, and maple leaves, seemed to await around most corners.

What Didn’t We See?

  • Industry 5.0. A worrying number of pre-show press releases landed in my inbox, threatening to “embrace,” “connect with,” “unlock,” or “empower” Industry 5.0. I was relieved to discover that this silliness didn’t reach the fairground itself, where not one banner, poster, or spokesperson used “5.0” in my sight or hearing. In the context of smart manufacturing, there’s absolutely no sign that Industry 5.0 is something to want, need, or talk about. We’ve got enough to do in realizing the decade-old promise of Industry 4.0!
  • Sustainability. As recently as 2022, “sustainability” was a key theme for Hannover Messe. It also featured pretty prominently in 2023 and 2024. This year, not so much. The new CEO of Schneider Electric, a company that’s been at the forefront of sustainability messaging for a long time, echoed a message we’ve been using at Forrester when he described the rationale for sustainability-related initiatives with “Do it for your wallet or the planet: It’s your choice.” The loud virtue-signaling was entirely absent. So, too, were a lot of the interesting green projects with questionable benefits. Credible efforts to reduce waste, minimize emissions, lower energy bills, and improve the circularity of products were all there to be found in every hall, but their sustainability benefits were usually hiding behind something else.

Warning: The Cockpit Is Overcrowded And The Silos Aren’t Disappearing

In a week of walking the halls; speaking to clients, prospects, and exhibitors; and chatting to other analysts, a couple of concerning trends began to emerge. Neither is an insurmountable problem yet, but there were enough warning signs that we should definitely pay close attention to both in the coming year.

  • The cockpit is getting very crowded. The original idea of an AI copilot, sitting alongside a human and helping them do their job, made a lot of sense. The analogy worked, and the approach was useful. But as we move toward agents and agentic workflows, and as more companies launch their own copilots, the marketing message and the practicalities of implementation are both getting messier. How is a customer or prospect meant to think about all of these copilots, and the ways they interact and overlap? It’s understandably confusing when multiple vendors are involved, but the picture is getting increasingly muddled even within a single vendor’s AI portfolio. There’s some work to do to more clearly illustrate what the combination of agents should look like, both technically and practically. Maybe there’ll eventually be just one copilot, and it’ll be their job to route requests between a human worker and a network of agents that the human never sees or directly interacts with? But we’re a long way from that future state, so how do we design the intermediate steps in ways that minimize confusion while maximizing utility?
  • Institutional silos may be breaking down, but we risk replacing them with personal silos. Data silos, organizational silos, and process silos are everywhere in manufacturing, and a lot of effort is rightly devoted to removing them. But might we be in danger of creating a new and even bigger problem as we try to scale some of the solutions? We’re seeing personalized dashboards, where no two people see the same inputs; low-/no-code applications, where every individual assembles their own slice of reality; and customized agentic workflows, with dependencies on specific AI agents. Everyone might be using a single source of truth for their data, but the layers on top of that data risk becoming increasingly individualized and difficult to manage, maintain, and secure at scale.

As always, if you have your own perspectives to share, please schedule a briefing and tell me all about them. If you’re a Forrester client and want to discuss (or challenge) my thinking on these topics, please schedule an inquiry or guidance session.

(Image source: Paul Miller)