vdma · 9 articles

Why inference at the edge matters for manufacturing AI

Platform decisions look boring from the outside. They look boring until the milliseconds and the data sovereignty rules start to matter. At the VDMA AI summit in Frankfurt today, "…

Permissions and guardrails — the security work AI deployments skip

I trust nothing by default. Including new technology. That is my job.

ERP, PLM, drawing libraries — the integration gap that sinks AI projects

There was a number at the VDMA AI summit in Frankfurt today that should stop every project sponsor in the room: as one speaker put it, 70% of AI projects fail due to poor data qual…

Boring deployment is a VDMA success factor

The VDMA AI summit in Frankfurt today listed six success factors for AI in mechanical engineering. "Verlässlichkeit" — reliability — made the list. I want to talk about what reliab…

From sensor data to decisions — the gap nobody draws on the whiteboard

At the VDMA AI summit in Frankfurt today, someone put up a slide showing "sensor data → AI → decision." Clean arrows, confident boxes. I've spent my career on printed circuit board…

The Mittelstand cooperates on everything else. Why not AI?

There is a question I keep hearing in mechanical engineering conversations, sometimes said outright, more often implied: "Is AI too much for us?" It is almost always the wrong ques…

The CAIO question: why AI strategy belongs in the boardroom but a new C-suite title usually doesn't

The afternoon panel at the VDMA Praxistag KI in Frankfurt — "KI: Einfach machen oder strategisch handeln!?" — was framed as a binary. Do it or plan it. Execute or deliberate. The s…

The room had twelve tables. Germany kept sitting at the wrong one.

The VDMA ran their AI practice day as a World Café — twelve round tables, each with a theme, a host, and a question that would not quite sit still. You rotated. You talked. You lis…

Live demos and the distance to production

There were live AI-agent demonstrations at the VDMA Praxistag KI in Frankfurt — proper ones, on stage, in front of eighty people. Vendors showing what their platforms can do: auton…