Official launch of AI² and the expert groups, published in ZWF

Association Industrial AI (AI²) is officially launched in Zeitschrift für wirtschaftlichen Fabrikbetrieb (ZWF). The article AI² Association Industrial AI e.V. is launched presents the association and its expert groups to the European production-engineering community - volume 121 (2026), issues 7–8, DOI 10.1515/zwf-2026-1100.

Industrial AI is treated as a key technology for European competitiveness, yet adoption still often stops at use cases and proofs of concept. Software teams have absorbed AI quickly. Engineering and manufacturing have not. The gap is becoming a strategic problem, not only a tooling one.

The authors argue that scalable implementation across engineering, manufacturing, and operations depends on foundations first: data that can be used, tools that sit inside existing environments, processes that are redesigned, interfaces between domains, infrastructure from cloud and edge to data spaces and MLOps, people who are trained, and governance that keeps use responsible and value-oriented. Transformer-based models add a further industrial constraint - similar inputs can produce different outputs - which sits poorly with environments that need precision, reproducibility, and trust.

"Adding AI on top of outdated processes and fragmented data landscapes rarely leads to the expected outcomes."