Over the course of a few weeks, I realized that although basically the same questions were asked, the same conclusions were drawn and, accordingly, fairly similar solutions were found, there was never really an exchange between the two industries, which could benefit so much from each other.

It would be reasonable to assume that the various industries would meet at trade fairs, but here too, they prefer to keep to themselves. Although the development departments of machine tool manufacturers, for example, can be found at trade fairs such as SPS and Embedded World, these events would also be of great interest to contract manufacturers or companies that want to intelligently network their production or test the use of artificial intelligence. After all, the electronics industry is traditionally always a few years ahead. AI, deep learning, machine learning, 5G - these are all topics that have played a central role in electronics and the embedded sector for several years now.

At the Hannover Messe, approaches were on show as to how sectors could come together and be successful together. All associations called for more interdisciplinary cooperation. The VDE formulated it clearly: CEO Ansgar Hinz called for more industry convergence and globalization. Mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and IT must move closer together in order to secure Germany's competitiveness. Hinz said in his statement: "Our strength lies in combining our industrial process and automation expertise with a modern AI toolbox. This may be our only opportunity - combining AI and our expertise in industrial production and automation in the relevant fields of application."

We at SCOPE are pleased to hear such statements, as they show that we are on the right track. In May last year, we set ourselves the goal of writing about important and exciting technologies for the manufacturing industry from the production, information technology and electronics sectors. Our motto: We connect industries! And you can read about this in each of our issues and on scope-online.de!