At VivaTech 2026 in Paris, France, Siemens announced two new capabilities for the Eigen Engineering Agent, its purpose-built AI for industrial automation engineering. Launched in April 2026 at Hannover Messe, the agent moves AI beyond on-screen suggestions to action in the physical world.
Industrial AI that acts, not just advises
Most AI assistants generate suggestions. The Eigen Engineering Agent does the work: it plans, executes and validates industrial automation engineering tasks end-to-end. It understands the project, writes the control software, configures the system and keeps refining its work until it meets defined quality benchmarks. This allows automation engineers to focus on system-level decisions.
The Eigen Engineering Agent works alongside the TIA Portal, Siemens’ engineering software platform, and is part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio.
Productivity gains in the real world
More than 100 companies in 19 countries are using the Eigen Engineering Agent, including ANDRITZ Metals (Austria), CASMT (China), and Prism Systems (United States). The agent accelerates everyday engineering work such as programmable logic controller (PLC) programming, human-machine interface (HMI) visualization and device configuration, with measurable gains:
- 2 to 5 times faster execution than manual workflows
- up to 50 percent efficiency gains in engineering
- 80 percent improvement in overall solution quality
“The Eigen Engineering Agent shows what AI can deliver beyond the digital world,” said Peter Koerte, member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and the company’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief Strategy Officer. “It makes companies up to 50 percent more efficient in complex engineering work, while making the results more reliable. That’s what it takes to build the machines, factories and infrastructure that keep everyday life running – and it’s what real value from AI in the physical world looks like.”
With the new capabilities – ECAD integration and standards-compliant project generation – the Eigen Engineering Agent now understands more of the context that comes before software development itself, including hardware topology, machine structure and engineering intent. The capabilities together move the Eigen Engineering Agent further upstream in the automation lifecycle, helping engineers start from the system as designed rather than from manual setup work.
ECAD integration: closing the gap between electrical design and automation code
Today, electrical and automation engineering happen in sequence, using different tools and different ways of describing the same machine. Electrical engineers design the wiring and hardware in ECAD tools. Automation engineers then program how the machine behaves, working from tags, function blocks and control logic. Translating from one to the other is manual today: engineers retype lists of devices, fix mismatched names and track down late hardware changes. That costs time and creates errors.
The Eigen Engineering Agent reads electrical design files in widely used formats including XML and AML. It detects inconsistencies, resolves or flags them, adds devices to the TIA Portal project, configures the connections and generates PLC tags grounded in the actual hardware topology. The result is a faster, cleaner start to every project and software that starts from the electrical design as built.
From machine description to a standards-compliant project
Every new automation project starts the same way. Engineers break the machine down into parts, name the modules, organize the data and define how the machine moves between states. Even experienced teams spend days on this before they can write a single line of control software. New hires take longer.
The Eigen Engineering Agent now turns machine descriptions into standards-compliant projects in minutes. Engineers describe the machine in plain language: its stations, devices and how it should behave. The agent generates a complete project that follows the Siemens Automation Framework, Siemens' best-practice reference for structuring TIA Portal projects. The project opens directly in TIA Portal, ready to build on.
“Engineering teams lose time between electrical design and software and between knowing best practices and applying them,” said Vasi Philomin, Executive Vice President and Head of Data and AI at Siemens. “With these new capabilities, the Eigen Engineering Agent brings hardware topology, system structure and engineering intent into the automation workflow, enabling automation engineers to start from a project that already reflects the system they need to automate. This way engineers can focus more on the work that matters.”
