Scaling AI for Industrial Competitiveness

How can a high-tech company turn AI from individual experiments into measurable business impact at scale — not only through efficiency, but also by building new capabilities, changing how work gets done, strengthening competitiveness and learning how to operate responsibly in a fast-moving field?

Sarah Engel, Head of AI at TRUMPF, shares insights from the company’s ongoing AI transformation across three dimensions: applying AI to improve and rethink existing processes; creating AI-powered products and services to strengthen TRUMPF’s offering; and powering AI at its very core through the advanced laser technology required for the production of AI chips.

Drawing on TRUMPF’s journey, she explores how strategy, operating model, technology, use-case delivery and employee enablement need to work together in a global industrial organization. In an environment that is still very new, highly dynamic and often overwhelming, the session offers practical impulses on how to create orientation, make deliberate choices, build trust and move from experimentation towards scalable AI capabilities.

The perspective is ambitious, but deliberately humble: there is no finished blueprint for AI transformation. Instead, there are principles, experiences and lessons to share — including what has worked, what has been difficult and what TRUMPF is still learning along the way.