Hannover Messe 2024 is a global industrial trade fair that welcomes more than 130,000 attendees and brings together companies from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, digital industries, and the energy sector to showcase solutions for a sustainable industry. This year’s event took place in April and focused on how to form a connected industrial ecosystem through the theme Energizing a Sustainable Industry.
Together with our partners, Microsoft is helping customers revolutionize manufacturing and build a more sustainable future. As one of more than 4,000 participating companies at HM2024, we were proud to highlight many of our partners’ latest innovations.
Microsoft partners have successfully leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing across four key areas:
- Unlocking innovation in design and engineering to accelerate development cycles for new products and services.
- Enabling intelligent factories to improve quality and resource utilization with industrial internet-of-things (IoT), data and AI.
- Creating resilient and sustainable operations to operationalize sustainability plans across supply chain and service.
- Enhancing employee productivity with AI to empower employees across business functions.
We’re also helping our partners deliver transformational solutions with investments in data and AI solutions, including manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, Copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI, Azure IoT Operations, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service.
Additionally, we’ve created a new certified software designation for Solutions Partners in manufacturing and other industries, as part of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. Through research, partnership, and new investments, we are bringing partners the capabilities and benefits to help them empower customers of every size, in every industry. These designations certify that our partner solutions are optimally built on Microsoft Industry Clouds to deliver their solutions.
Transforming manufacturing with AI-powered industrial solutions
In this blog, you’ll find some of the remarkable work that our featured partners shared at HM24, many of whom are showcasing their own copilots and transforming manufacturing by integrating enhanced solutions with Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.
Through the power of AI, partners are unlocking innovation in design and engineering to create new business opportunities, enable engineering agility, and accelerate time to market.
- Ansys visualizes physics in real-time with digital twins, through a virtual replica of an in-service physical asset that mirrors the life and experience of the asset.
- PTC is improving end-to-end visibility and efficiency with digital thread, enabling customers to develop, build, and service highly configurable products more efficiently and sustainably.
- Hexagon is accelerating production innovation through Hexagon's open platform Nexus, which drives real-time connectivity and collaboration to power innovation in manufacturing.
- Capgemini is codesigning AI use cases with Phoenix, a generative AI demo of the future of multimodal human-machine interaction.
- NVIDIA is using Omniverse APIs within Microsoft’s PowerBI platform to demonstrate the power of synchronizing the physical and digital worlds and provide better contextual insight.
- Threedy is simulating factory environments with live 3D digital twins to demonstrate a fully integrated factory data visualization that combines IoT and CAD in a mixed-reality environment.
- SIEMENS is driving innovation with their generative AI solution, which enhances shopfloor capabilities and aids maintenance engineers and technicians.
"The Siemens Industrial Copilot is bringing industrial generative AI to the shopfloor and will be an indispensable part of the engineering process in the future."
– Rainer Brehm, CEO Factory Automation at Siemens Digital Industries
Other partners are enabling intelligent factories by leveraging data, AI, and industrial IoT to optimize resource utilization and drive production with reliable quality and yield.
- AVEVA is unlocking agility, productivity, and performance with generative AI for operational technology (OT) and engineering technology (ET) data.
- SymphonyAI is improving operational performance with generative AI by connecting assets, systems, and people in industrial organizations.
- Rockwell is connecting digital and physical for autonomous, intelligent factories comprised of digital twins, contextualized data collection at scale, and automated material movement.
- TCS is enabling the factory of the future by supporting maintenance shopfloor managers, utilizing a combination of generative AI, TCS Neural Manufacturing, and TCS Sustainability suite.
- Tulip augments frontline operations with generative AI copilots to help citizen developers and manufacturing engineers simplify the process of building and deploying solutions.
- Cognite Data Fusion Quick Start empowers operations to interact with data naturally to solve problems faster by increasing uptime with easy access to complex industrial data.
- SAP with Syntax is bringing excellence with agile manufacturing process orchestration, enabling manufacturers to efficiently run their end-to-end manufacturing and supply chain.
- Accenture and Avanade are working with Sony to transform the design-make-and-use value chain by creating near real-time intelligence from diverse factory and enterprise systems.
- Sight Machine is unlocking factory data for AI and data-driven excellence—streaming, transforming, and analyzing plant floor data in real time to optimize plant productivity.
"With Sight Machine on Microsoft Fabric, companies are able to use plant floor data just as easily and powerfully as they use other data to optimize production globally. It has never been possible to do this in a truly data-driven way."
– Jon Sobel, CEO and co-Founder of Sight Machine
To create resilient and sustainable operations, partners are utilizing the power of AI to reduce risk across the supply chain, achieve real-time visibility, and enable AI-driven planning and execution.
- Blue Yonder is reinventing supply chain management by bringing together market-proven expertise to improve decision making, increase revenue and margins, and reduce.
- ToolsGroup is maximizing end-to-end supply chain efficiency with AI, ensuring product availability to deliver the right product to the right location, at the right time and lowest cost.
- o9 Solutions is optimizing planning and decision making with generative AI to enable a 10x boost in expertise, collaboration, user experience and productivity.
"We’re very excited to collaborate with Microsoft and its Azure OpenAI Service offering to open new possibilities in streamlining supply chain processes and breaking down siloed knowledge transfer capabilities for our joint customers."
– Chakri Gottemukkala, co-founder and CEO of o9
Microsoft and its partners have emerged as pivotal influencers in the manufacturing industry, walking side-by-side with customers as they explore the possibilities of AI on their transformation journeys.
Learn more about manufacturing solutions from Microsoft
To learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and our work with key partners: