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I recently sat down with with a Journalist from an Industry Publication for a long conversation about Industrial DevOps. We talked about tools, about AI, about NIS2. But the question that stayed with me afterwards was a bigger one:
What is all of this actually for? Here is my answer. It's not about software. It's about society.
Everything you touch was made by automation. Look around you right now. The screen case you're reading this on likely came out of an injection molding machine. Some parts of the desk it sits probably on passed through a sheet metal press. The elevator you took this morning, the escalator at the mall, the packaging line that filled your drink — there is a PLC inside every single one of them. Automation technology quietly powers the majority of the physical goods humanity consumes every day. Mining, discrete manufacturing, process industries, pharma, food, logistics — it is everywhere. It is not a niche. It is the substrate of modern life. And yet, for decades, we have managed the software that runs all of this like it's the 1990s. Source code on a USB stick hanging in a cabinet. The master copy on a laptop belonging to a colleague who retired three years ago. Engineers flying to another continent only to discover they brought the wrong IDE version. That era is ending. And what replaces it is one of the most exciting stories of our time.
The talent vote has already been cast. Here is a truth every manufacturing leader needs to hear: the vote is happening with people's feet. Young engineers coming out of education today learned to build software with modern DevOps toolchains, cloud environments, and AI assistants. When they walk into a factory and are handed a ten-year-old laptop with a locked-down IDE, they don't argue. They just leave — and take their talent to some app company instead. Demographics have shifted the power to skilled people. The manufacturers who give their automation engineers world-class tools will get the best people. The ones who don't, won't. It is that simple. This is exactly what we build for at Software Defined Automation. We want the automation engineer, the robotics engineer, the Physical AI professional to have tools as good as any developer at a top software company — in the browser, across every vendor ecosystem, with AI agents working alongside them under full human control.
Automation engineering: the most exciting job of the next decade. I genuinely believe this: The automation engineer will be the hero of the coming re-industrialization. Think about what this role demands. A standard software developer never has to understand physics. An automation engineer has to understand code and how a robot moves, how a weld point must sit on a car body, how a packaging line breathes. That combination — software plus the physical world — is precisely where the greatest value of the AI era will be created. The automation engineer of the near future won't be the person driving to the plant at 2 a.m. for a trivial fix. They will:
- Write and orchestrate their own AI agents that handle the routine work
- Talk directly to product designers, collapsing the distance between design and production
- Command the full source code of the factory — every controller, every vendor, one platform
- Earn more, create more, and matter more than ever before
Companies that achieve full integration from product design down to the source code of production will design and scale products exponentially faster. The result for all of us: an explosion of better products, at higher quality, at lower cost. That is what re-industrialization actually looks like from the inside.
The West as underdog — and why that's liberating
Let's be honest with ourselves: in manufacturing, Europe and the US are no longer the automatic leaders. We are the underdog now. And underdogs have one advantage — they are allowed to work differently. China calls it China speed. I say (just to name some, concrete locations of our customers): we need Spanish, Belgian, Italian, German, Austrian, , Swiss, Mexican, Brazilian, and US speed. Stop running eight-month evaluation projects before anyone touches anything. Give your automation engineers a small scope, let them try modern tools, and trust their judgment. If it makes their job better, invest. Iterate fast. That is how innovation actually enters a market. And no — regulation is not the excuse. Under NIS2, not having full access and source code control is what puts you effectively out of compliance. Doing nothing is the risky move now.
The factory is code. Every factory, like every car and soon every appliance, is fundamentally a software/AI enabled product. Treat it like one, and innovation flows in at software speed. That is the entire idea behind Software Defined Automation. We didn't start this company to sell features. We started it because we believe the industrial base in the West deserves a comeback — and because we believe the people who will deliver that comeback deserve the best tools ever built.
The factories are ready. The technology is ready. And a new generation of engineers is waiting for a reason to choose this industry - Let's give them one.