How Siemens USA’s CEO Meets The Moment With Technology And People

Siemens is a global conglomerate that connects technology and energy together for industrial automation, resilient buildings and power systems and sustainable transportation. Globally, the company has seen its orders and revenue growing, with a record high €9 billion ($9.45 billion) in net income in fiscal year 2024. I talked to Siemens USA CEO Barbara Humpton about the company’s recent moves and plans.

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. It was excerpted in the Forbes CEO newsletter.

How have things been at Siemens lately?

Humpton: It’s been one of the most exciting times I can remember. Here we are, at a moment when the world needs the things that Siemens has been working on. Especially if we think about electrification, automation, digitalization, these are the superpowers of Siemens and all those mega trends are pointing in our direction.

Siemens has a sprawling footprint, with involvement in a vast array of industries. As U.S. CEO, how do you keep tabs on it all?

Let me lay a background in terms of how Siemens has set its strategy overall. In 2010, the company took a look at global mega trends and focused in on climate change, urbanization—75% of people will live in cities by the year 2050. The aging demographics—by 2050, people will live to be 120. The globalization that was going on in 2010, now we talk about it in terms of “glocalization,” with global innovation, but more local production, and the digitalization of everything. Against that backdrop, the Siemens Corporation set its business strategy to apply our core skills to these global mega trends. The real trick has been finding the right people. We’ve got experts in fields ranging from emerging digitalization techniques like AI, all the way to critical infrastructure and the guts of manufacturing. Anywhere that the real world has the potential to meet the digital world and perform better, that’s where Siemens has been focused.

How do I as a CEO stay abreast of all that? First, I’m a person with a lot of natural curiosity, and I love learning. I love being challenged by new and different domains. We’ve got a really fantastic team with deep expertise in all these areas. For me, when you think about having the right technology, the right strategy, the right people to meet a moment, what’s really important is setting the table so that the leaders across the business come together and work together. That’s really been the most fun thing about Siemens over the last six years that I’ve been the CEO of Siemens USA.

You’ve been with Siemens for a total of about 13 years. When you first joined the company, did you have your eyes on climbing the ladder and eventually becoming USA CEO?

Not at all. I was asked to join because my background was in the world of government contracting. I’ve been at IBM, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, always serving the needs of the U.S. federal government, doing things like the global positioning system, the software for the ground control segment, working on biometrics with the FBI, or border security with Customs and Border Protection.

When a former boss of mine called and said, “Hey, I’ve just joined Siemens, and I think you would really fit in well here,” I had to go to the library and get the annual report to see what does this company do. That’s when I was introduced to this business strategy built around global mega trends. I had been focused in on U.S. national security, but here was an opportunity to actually work with a company that’s a national asset. Siemens is in the backbone of the economy of the U.S. A chance to work in a way that impacts global security is what really attracted me to this company.

What made you want to stay with Siemens, and how did your career progress?

I was leading business development and strategy for our unit called Siemens Government Technology. It is actually separately incorporated in order to meet the needs of the U.S. federal government. I was asked to be the successor of Judy Marks, who was the CEO who brought me in. When she departed, I stepped up into that role.

You know what’s interesting? The U.S. federal government needs everything that Siemens makes. From working with the people who are electrifying bases all around the world, to people who are working on the digital tools that are helping the Navy optimize their performance, there’s no bigger energy user [or] landlord anywhere in the world [than] the U.S. government. By focusing on what our customer needed, I was able to meet all of the key players across this great corporation and get to know the details of their business. When this role opened up, I raised my hand and said, ‘I’m here. I’m ready.’ That’s great. Then the CEO invited me to come and take the role, and it’s been a joy ever since.

What are some of the more recent things you’ve been doing with technology to solve industry problems and connect the physical world to the digital world to make things operate better?

What a lot of people have[n’t] seen quite yet is the fact that we are opening up a new tech sector. Think about all of the explosion of technology in information technology that’s happened over the last decades. The way we communicate with each other, the way we engage in retail commerce, entertain ourselves, all of that has been enhanced through digital technologies. Those same technologies are now coming into the built world. In other words, don’t use this technology to escape reality, use this technology to make reality better. If you think of these last decades as creating the internet of people, what’s coming is the internet of things, and it’s an order of magnitude bigger than what we’ve experienced so far.

What’s new and different in the fields of infrastructure industry transportation? Turns out the underlying use of three core technologies changes everything. One is the digital twin. We can now simulate anything. We can simulate something you want to build. We can simulate a factory that might build it. We can simulate that thing in operation. Being able to do simulation modeling, make lots of decisions before we ever build the thing, is speeding up the cycle times to market, and it’s making all of us more productive.

We are getting a real world more connected. We can now have software-defined automation. Think about the cars we drive now and how they do software updates. The same thing can happen in a factory. This changes everything. Simulation, digital twins, software-defined automation, coupled with collecting data and using AI. I think what we’re about to see is the democratization of fields that used to be unapproachable for average people. How many people do you know who say, I love programming? You can now program simply by speaking a natural language. And large language models can translate your intent into the computer language of whatever machine you’re interested in programming.

The world of manufacturing opens up to more people who in the past might have only qualified for things we used to think of as blue-collar jobs. What if in the future, every job is a white-collar job because we’ve got machines capable of doing the dangerous and dirty things, and all we need is people who understand how to make things to really drive the operation of that factory? The things that we see happening, sometimes first they appear in the field of entertainment: Here’s this cool new thing. Have you tried it? Look at this gadget. Then you realize that we’ve got people, engineers and others, who have been bringing these technologies into labs and then into actual customer environments and trying them out. They are game changers in the real world.

Be on the lookout for a [new] field. It’s hard to know what to call it. Industrial AI? Industrial technology? We sometimes refer to it as operational technology. I call it AI with purpose. [It] is how we are applying the emerging technologies today to make the real world better.

What is the uptake like for some of these new technologies? Some of the industries that you work in are traditionally slow to update.

It’s so interesting to watch how change happens because the first thing to realize is that our success is probably the biggest roadblock to change. When you find organizations who are wildly successful, the big question is: We’ve invested all this in what we already do, why would we change?

I love the way one of our leaders in digital industries talks about it. He says, our job is to help customers change at the speed of relevance. It turns out that there are a lot of fields that are becoming very competitive. Think about the auto industry. When electric vehicles are introduced, suddenly all auto manufacturers have to ask the question: Wait, am I in? And if so, what am I doing to my operations? That impacts the entire supply chain. The whole supply chain finds that they can change more rapidly if they’re using digital twins, if they’re communicating with one another in connected environments. We’re finding that the market forces are a pull, as much as we as innovators are a push into the market.

There are certain fields that are changing rapidly, things like the battery manufacturing sector. Anywhere where we’re starting with some new greenfields, you’ll see people planting the flag with the new technologies. Look also to aerospace and defense, where there’s a huge need to speed cycle times and to be more efficient. You’ll see Siemens being used everywhere as aerospace manufacturers’ OEMs, as well as their supply chain, are building out the digitalization of their processes. It’s that pull from the customer that’s making change happen.

When we think about the impact of this new tech sector on something like the field of manufacturing, we’re at a moment when we are doing a lot of investment in the U.S. in manufacturing. We are big believers that the tools we have today can empower small and medium enterprises.

Imagine a future state where we move data, not stuff. Today, we’re shipping things around the world, looking for the low labor source. In the future, using tools like the ones that we’re bringing to market, we have the ability to share designs, and to have manufacturers on a much more local basis produce not only using a bill of materials, but also a bill of process. A connected automated manufacturing site can securely build to print, if you will, for a creator who may be located somewhere else in the world. Look for a more distributed, more connected network of manufacturers in the future.

You see that same sort of effect happening in infrastructure. Where does the grid and a building begin? It turns out the grid edge is getting much more fluid. At the grid edge, we get more of the two-way flow of electricity. We get electric vehicles on the grid. We get buildings with their own power sources feeding electricity back. All of that gets controlled by data: the digital twin, the software that enables the hardware to seamlessly connect. The same thing is happening in transportation.

It’s these kinds of developments all across the built world that are proof points that combining the real and the digital is incredibly powerful, and it’s going to fuel the economy moving forward.

Siemens recently announced the intended acquisition of Altair Engineering. Tell me a bit about that and what it does for the company.

Our global CEO has described it as a diamond. You’re looking constantly for the innovators who would compliment our capability, with a minimal amount of overlap with where we already have strengths. Altair provides a fantastic fit for Siemens. They themselves are in the simulation business. They’re in the AI and data business as well. When you create a digital twin, your goal is not to create something that looks like the thing you want to build. You want it to act like the thing you want to build. Altair has complementary disciplines. Many of our customers were already using both of us in their environments, so the idea of combining forces means that we bring to our customers the most comprehensive digital twin. We give them maximum capacity to do real world modeling of the elements, the items that they’re seeking to build themselves.

We look forward to this now here in the U.S. We know that the U.S. has been the digital innovator for the world, so it is perfectly natural that we find this innovator here. But what you’ll see is that unlocking our access to customers all around the world is going to help Altair expand their business significantly as well.

For many companies, the last couple of years have been somewhat bumpy as the global economy recovered from pandemic-era shocks. Has Siemens’ business been impacted?

If you looked at the last few earnings calls, you’d see Siemens responding to changes in economies all around the world. From a U.S. perspective, there are two things I’d note. One is the sheer resilience of the U.S. market, but couple that with a Siemens U.S. team that has a superpower of being able to pivot. Our focus throughout, from the time Covid hit through to present day, [has been]this idea of: Let’s make sure we’re looking not only right out our front door, but across the horizon to say, where are we needed? Where do we need to have capability?

Before Covid, one of our largest and most successful businesses has been our buildings practice. We’re the ones who have technology for buildings. What that team did when Covid hit was switch their focus to health: indoor air quality and what could be done to make buildings safer for all U.S. schools, businesses, et cetera.

Meanwhile, the team that builds electrical switch gear, the equipment that moves electricity and critical facilities like manufacturing or data centers, could see the coming wave of electrification. What we didn’t realize at the time was that AI would come along and that AI would drive almost a tenfold increase in the demand for data center construction. By staying alert to signals and then pivoting to where the need arises, this team has stayed on its toes and managed to address the critical opportunities, but also requirements of the economy.

I keep talking to our team about it. When you’re a national asset, when you’re in the backbone of the economy, it’s critical that we rise to meet the need. But sometimes it’s not so much a responsibility; it’s more of a privilege. A recent award is a great illustration of this. We competed for the first high speed rail line that will be implemented in the U.S. Brightline West will run between LA and Las Vegas. We know that we are a global leader in high-speed rail. We’ve been working in something like 10 countries already. The big question mark was, when will the U.S. get high-speed rail? We know how fantastic this is elsewhere. It’s a brilliant plan because when you look across the United States, you see city pairs like this one LA to Las Vegas. It’s a long drive. Doesn’t it make sense if you could put a high-speed train between those two sites? Siemens has been selected to build those rail cars.

Tell me about Siemens’ commitment to sustainability.

It is our business. When that strategy was developed back in 2010, it was clear that we had incredible contributions to make in sustainability. Whether it’s decarbonization, whether it’s the reusability of resources, designing for recyclability is a hot, hot trend. The decision was made that we have capabilities to bring to the table. In 2015, we became the first large industrial to commit to be carbon neutral by 2030. What we said is we’ll be halfway there by 2020, and then we’ll do the hard half between 2020 and 2030. We’re hitting all of our intermediate milestones. We produce an annual report. We’ve built a framework that goes beyond decarbonization. It has an acronym name, DEGREE, and it builds in ethics, governance, equity and employability.

What this says is: We’re delivering financial results for sure, but we also want to keep an eye on and be accountable to shareholders and other stakeholders for the non-financial measures that drive our performance over the long haul. This is our business plan. This sustainability is central to our strategy. It is the theme.

What can we expect to see from Siemens in 2025?

Continued emphasis on electrification. Clearly, this is huge. Second, the digitalization of manufacturing. New and different ways to bring these tools of digital twin software, defined automation, AI, and data to bring that into the manufacturing sector.