GoKawiilToday, I’m talking with Roland Busch, who is the CEO of Siemens.
Siemens is one of those absolutely giant, extremely important, but fairly opaque companies we love to dig into on Decoder. At a very basic, reductive level, Siemens makes the hardware and software that allow other companies to run and automate their stuff. Everyone has seen the Siemens logo somewhere, whether it’s under the hood of their cars, stamped on control systems in fancy buildings, or scattered across factory floors. But since it’s not really a consumer-facing company, it’s hard to know what ties all these ideas together — and what some 320,000 Siemens employees across the world are actually working on.
How all those people are organized and work together is wildly complicated. Roland and I spent some real time just talking through the Siemens corporate structure, which, for my true Decoderheads out there, was incredibly fascinating.
Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here.
We also spent a lot of time talking about automation broadly and what happens as AI brings automation from the physical world of factories into the digital world of accounting and procurement — the things that help decide what factories should be doing. Roland’s vision is for Siemens to automate the whole factory process, upstream and downstream of actually making things. And you’ll hear him describe that outcome as fairly utopian: a smooth, seamless, optimal operation. Very German. But I wanted to press him on how dystopian it sounds to me. Because in Roland’s vision, it seems like there’s a whole class of people who just… don’t have jobs anymore. And the ones who do have jobs don’t really have a whole lot of autonomy or fulfillment from them, but basically just serve as the hands for the all-seeing AI. So I asked him fairly directly about that.
And if that’s not already all complicated enough: Siemens is a government and defense contractor on both sides of the Atlantic and a company whose overall growth is directly tied to free trade and globalization in the postwar era. A lot is going on right now that might challenge how the world works, especially if tensions keep rising between the US and Europe, and so I had to ask him point-blank: Do you think about what you’ll do if NATO collapses? Because that’s not as far-fetched a question as it used to be.
There’s a lot in this one, and Roland was game for it all. I think you’ll leave with a lot to think about — certainly more to think about whenever you see all those Siemens logos.
Okay: Siemens CEO Roland Busch. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Roland Busch, you are the president and CEO of Siemens. Welcome to Decoder.
... continue reading