Automation engineering tool is ‘a defining moment for industrial AI’
21 April 2026 
At the Hannover Messe, Siemens has unveiled a purpose-designed AI tool dedicated to automation engineering tasks such as configuring drives, coding PLCs and setting up HMIs. It says the Eigen Engineering Agent represents a new class of industrial AI product – one that no longer simply generates suggestions, but uses multi-step reasoning and self-correction to carry out automation tasks autonomously.
Siemens says the Agent will complete AI-powered workflows two to five times faster than manual alternatives, delivering up to 80% higher quality and 50% improved engineering efficiency. The company has piloted the system with more than 100 customers in 19 countries.
Unlike generic AI tools, the new Agent operates inside real engineering systems, with full awareness of each project’s context and constraints. Using this understanding, it can execute automation engineering tasks, while meeting industrial standards for correctness, safety and reliability.
Siemens says the tool will free engineers to focus on higher-level system challenges, without compromising accuracy or reliability.
Siemens board member Peter Koerte, who is also the company’s chief technology officer and chief strategy officer, describes the launch of the Eigen Engineering Agent as “a defining moment for industrial AI – where the technology becomes as easy to use as consumer AI, yet far more consequential”. He adds that it “creates concrete business value for our customers. And it has the potential to fundamentally transform how they design, build, and operate the industrial systems we rely on.”
“As demand outpaces capacity, automation engineering is becoming a bottleneck,” adds Siemens’ executive vice-president and head of data and AI, Vasi Philomin. “Manufacturers are under pressure to deliver increasingly complex systems faster, while skilled engineering resources remain constrained. With the Eigen Engineering Agent, we are delivering automation logic that meets each customer’s standards, so engineers can take on more complex projects, faster.
“This product signals a fundamental shift from AI that makes suggestions to AI that actually completes work,” he continues. “In industrial environments, this difference determines the value AI can create.”
Examples of the tasks that the Eigen Engineering Agent can perform include:
- Configuring drives, motors and encoders, and supporting read/write parameter set-ups for single‑axis drives, including automatic configuration using imported spreadsheets or guided prompting.
- Development and testing of PLC code, including SCL and LAD generation by creating or adapting code, generating test logic, and fixing compilation or syntax errors within seconds.
- Developing HMIs and visualisation, by generating and integrating JavaScript for dynamic HMI behaviour. It supports smooth migration by transitioning VB scripts into WinCC Unified, and enables intelligent tag dynamisation for fast, consistent set-up of dynamic tag behaviours.
While advances in AI have shown promise, Siemens argues, off-the-shelf AI tools currently produce broad suggestions that engineers must translate manually to their specific projects. This can introduce errors and often takes as long as doing the work from scratch. To reduce risks, automation engineers need tools that understand their projects and can conform to their organisations’ standards.
The Eigen Engineering Agent connects to TIA Portal – Siemens’ Totally Integrated Automation engineering platform – giving it a complete contextual understanding of every project. It references the project’s data structures, blocks, parameters, and component relationships, so can deliver usable outputs immediately, tailored to what engineers are actually building – even on legacy or undocumented systems.
“The connection of the Eigen Engineering Agent to our TIA Portal is another step toward our vision of ‘automating automation,’” says Rainer Brehm, Siemens’ CTO and COO for automation in Siemens Digital Industries. “By enabling goal-driven, agentic engineering workflows, we’re eliminating repetitive effort for automation engineers while significantly increasing their productivity. This marks an important shift for our customers from manually executing tasks to orchestrating outcomes across the entire engineering workflow.”
Simens says that this contextual understanding also transforms onboarding. At one large automotive line builder, for example, new engineers were spending weeks learning project structures and component relationships before they could contribute to the project. Using Eigen Agent, the company found that new team members could query a project directly. A request such as “Show me all blocks controlling Station 3” returned an immediate, accurate response. As a result, onboarding time dropped from weeks to days.
Before presenting results, the Agent validates all outputs. It breaks down complex tasks, executes them step-by-step, evaluates its own performance against the project’s requirements, and iterates until the work is ready for review.
Companies that have already piloted the Eigen Engineering Agent include:
- US-based Prism Systems, which used it to create, modify, and import SCL code, cutting the process to seconds. “Tools like ChatGPT showed us how powerful AI can be, and engineers quickly recognised their potential,” comments Prism president, John Elias. “The challenge has been bringing that capability into real industrial workflows. Siemens’ latest tools help close that gap, allowing us to apply AI in a way that truly supports engineering and automation.”
- CASMT, a Chinese company that builds production lines for new energy vehicles, found that the Agent reduced time-to-market by automating device configuration, code generation and HMI visualisation. “This is an AI assistant truly built for industrial automation,” says Dr Kevin Firouzian, CASMT’s head of global strategy and partnerships. “For our EMB (electromechanical braking) line, the Eigen Engineering Agent transformed a complex, multi‑discipline challenge into a conversational workflow. It simplified set-up, reduced specialist handoffs, accelerated delivery, and made debugging significantly faster.”
- Andritz Metals, a supplier of technologies for metal processing and forming, used to tool to accelerate its development of industrial automation and control software, using it to generate code and documentation and faster. “We believe AI will fundamentally transform industrial engineering,” says Andritz’s head of engineering processes and electric, Michael Luu. “It has the potential to unlock massive gains in productivity, cost efficiency, and overall competitiveness.”
The launch of Eigen Engineering Agent is part of Siemens’ €1bn investment in industrial AI, announced lat November, and follows news of its increased growth targets, driven in part by expanding its AI activities.
