Nilay Patel

Hello and welcome to Decoder.

I'm Neil I. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

Today, I'm talking with Roland Busch, the CEO of Siemens.

Now, Siemens is one of those absolutely giant, extremely important, and yet fairly opaque companies that we love to dig into here on Decoder.

At a very basic, very reductive level, Siemens makes the hardware and software that lets other companies run and automate their stuff.

You've seen the Siemens logo everywhere, whether it's under the hood of your car, stamped on the control system of a fancy building, or scattered across factory floors.

But since it's not really a consumer facing company, it's hard to know what ties all those ideas together and what some 320,000 Siemens employees across the world are actually working on.

How all of those people are organized and how they all work together is wildly complicated.

Roland and I spent some real time just talking through the Siemens corporate structure, which for the true decoder heads out there was incredibly fascinating.

Roland and I also spent a lot of time talking about automation broadly.

And what happens is AI brings automation out of the physical world of factories and into the digital world of the front office, the world of accounting and procurement, the things that help decide what the factory should be doing.

Roland's vision is for Siemens to automate the entire factory process, upstream and downstream of actually making things.

And you'll hear him describe that outcome as fairly utopian.

Smooth, seamless, optimal operation.

Very German.

But I wanted to press him on how dystopian that sounds to a lot of us.

Because in Rowan's vision of pure automation, it seems like there's a lot of people who just don't have jobs anymore.

And the ones who do have jobs don't really have a lot of autonomy or fulfillment from them, because they're basically just doing what AI tells them to do.

So we talked about that pretty directly.

And if that's not a lot of complicated, heavy decoder ideas already, well, Siemens is also a government and defense contractor on both sides of the Atlantic, and a company whose growth historically has been tied directly to free trade and globalization in the post-war era.