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CES 2026: From Vision to Industrial Reality

CES in Las Vegas opens up every new year with a big bang – with an enormous density of innovation, setting trends and teasing where entire industries are heading.

KION once again used this global stage as a strategic waypoint, thinking outside the box — to connect with partners, and demonstrating how AI and digital twins are evolving decisively from promise into practice. Building on the momentum of CES 2025, KION was honored to part of Siemens CEO Roland Busch’s keynote and showed how close collaboration within a strong ecosystem is turning innovation into scalable, customer-grade industrial reality.

2026-01-08

Dennis Lüneburger

Over the past year, the joint work with NVIDIA and Accenture has accelerated the transformation of supply chains with physical AI, simulation and automation in real-world environments. What once lived in concepts and prototypes is now being deployed to make supply chains more adaptive, resilient and continuously optimized — inside the four walls of warehouses and beyond.

Partnering with Siemens: Advancing Digital Twin–Based Solutioning

With Siemens as an additional partner, KION is further strengthening its ability to connect the digital and physical worlds at scale. By combining Siemens’ engineering and automation expertise with NVIDIA Omniverse, KION is advancing digital twin–based solutioning to a new level. The Siemens Digital Twin Composer brings engineering data, automation logic and physical assets together in one unified environment. This allows customers to validate solutions earlier, commission systems virtually and execute complex intralogistics projects with far greater predictability.

The impact is tangible: project timelines are significantly shortened, risks are reduced, and systems deliver reliable performance from day one. What once took years to design, test and deploy can now be realized in months — while increasing operational resilience.

Faster from Concept to Reality

Rob Smith, CEO of KION Group, puts it this way:

“At KION, we are scaling physical AI and automation solutions to orchestrate supply chains with a next level of precision, speed and resilience. Every new solution begins its life as a digital twin — tested, proven and ready to perform. This is how we move from concept to reality faster, compressing solutioning from years to months.”

The future of supply chains will not be shaped by isolated technologies, but by ecosystems that bring data, software, automation and AI together — seamlessly and at scale. And KION is playing an active role in building that future.

Watch Roland Busch's full keynote down below, KION's part starts around the 37:00 minute mark.