Fifteen years into Industry 4.0, many plants are still living with an IT/OT gap: great tech on paper, stubborn friction on the shop floor. This talk reframes digitalization from an operator-first perspective and explains, bluntly, why progress stalls in operations—safety trumps novelty (“don’t explode”), change is expensive, and scaling stays painfully linear.

We’ll show how most of today’s “AI in manufacturing” is still bolted onto the side of the stack, rather than built into the flow of work, and what that means for value capture.

Using a clear roadmap - Assistance (now), Collaboration (emerging), and Autonomy (future) - we map practical steps toward a vision we call the “Virtual Operator” while keeping process safety and reliability non-negotiable.

Attendees leave with a blueprint to align IT, engineering, and operations around the physical and digital twins, and to decide where AI belongs today versus tomorrow.