One of the more interesting observations from discussions at the recent European ARC Industry Forum was not about AI capability itself, but about how trust in AI quietly emerges inside industrial operations. Industrial organizations are no longer questioning whether AI can deliver value.

In this report, ARC includes the most recent quarterly results for major automation suppliers that publicly report their results. With this latest automation supply side-market update, ARC has increased the number and breadth of automation suppliers covered, based on a combination of publicly reported data and ARC’s own extensive research database. We have also added selected business intelligence visualizations.

The DEXPI standard represents a transformative step for the process industry, delivering true data interoperability across engineering platforms and throughout the asset lifecycle. By unifying data exchange and supporting advanced digitalization initiatives, DEXPI empowers organizations to achieve greater efficiency, enhance safety, and accelerate innovation in a rapidly evolving industrial landscape.

The strongest message from the forum was that industrial resilience must be designed into the operating model itself, from data architecture and digital twins to control logic, autonomous operations, and process-aware cybersecurity.

Machine builders now need to combine operator-centric intelligence, lifecycle digital twins, secure remote connectivity, and compliance-by-design to meet customer expectations and protect market access.

The automotive industry is changing rapidly in the face of new cost structures driven by the electric vehicle transition and fierce competition from China. In Audi’s view, the traditional model of delivering production equipment floor is outdated, and the future is software-driven production. This ARC View is part of a series of reports that dig deeper into the cultural and technical aspects of the EC4P initiative and roll out.

Industrial users continue to prioritize lifecycle economics, repeatability, and support accountability, reinforcing that successful digital transformation depends on disciplined execution rather than technology maturity alone.

Discussions at the ARC European Industry Leadership Forum 2026 revolved around the adoption and implementation of digital twins. Digital twin adoption is advancing, but it remains uneven across industrial organizations.

800V-class DC power is the next step for high-power data centers and factories, cutting current and losses as AI racks push power density higher.

The conversation around AI has clearly shifted from experimentation to execution. The real differentiator is no longer the AI itself, but the ability to embed it into operations through strong data foundations and contextualized workflows.

At the 2026 ARC European Industry Forum in Spain, the session on Edge, Cloud & Virtualization underscored that industrial automation is entering a new architectural phase. This ARC Insight draws on presentations from four organizations, each addressing a distinct dimension of the transition to software-defined automation.

The 2026 Hanover Fair reinforced three themes shaping industrial technology: Industrial AI is moving from demos to deployment (copilots, agents, orchestration); electrification and efficiency, especially for data centers and industrial DC, are rising to board-level priority; and software-defined automation is accelerating, with control logic increasingly decoupled from hardware and deployed across edge and cloud.

Autonomous asset optimization involves using real-time asset data, physics-based models, digital twins, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), AI agents, and automation workflows to optimize the performance and lifecycle of industrial assets with minimal human intervention.

As industrial robots become increasingly intelligent and capable with advances in machine learning, sensorimotor intelligence, and agentic decision making, traditional classification schemes are showing their limitations. Modern AI-enhanced robots often blur or transcend old categories, highlighting the need for updated ways to categorize and understand them. ARC proposes a framework based on the three major domains of industrial robot development.

The OPAS-aligned DCS was deployed at the end of 2024 and, although not without the expected “new system” issues, ExxonMobil reports it ran through 2025 with no major issues and no significant interruptions to operations and continues to run today.