For us, AI is neither a topic of the future nor uncharted territory: it is already part of our development work today and is being used productively in various areas. At Innovation Day 2026, the goal was therefore not to create first points of contact with AI. Instead, the focus was on the question: How can we consistently advance its use — in our day-to-day work, in our processes and in our products?
To explore this, the teams from 4PACE, N4, sequire and INOMIC came together. In parallel workshops, colleagues from development, product management, sales and other areas spent a full day deepening existing approaches, testing new use cases, discarding ideas and further developing concrete solutions. One insight ran through almost all workshops: it is no longer a question of whether AI is changing our work, but how we can integrate it into our processes, products and structures in a meaningful, secure way that delivers clear added value. Innovation Day provided the space to bring together existing experience, make new potential visible and develop concrete approaches for further implementation.
The topics covered the entire value chain — from requirements and specifications to development, testing and quality assurance, all the way to configuration, CAD data creation and project management.
We focused particularly intensively on the following areas:
Whether in product and quotation configuration, CAD data creation, 3D visualization or digital sales, the goal everywhere is to make complex product knowledge structured, reliable and usable. This is exactly where AI can come in, because it makes this knowledge accessible faster without replacing the specialist depth and know-how behind it.
One central idea shaped the day: AI delivers the greatest benefit where it specifically amplifies people’s experience and expertise. It can research, structure information, suggest variants and speed up recurring tasks. Professional assessment, contextual classification and responsibility remain crucial.
In our environment, where products are complex and requirements are individual, this principle is especially important. Our customers rely on the fact that every configuration, every quotation, every visualization and every interface is backed by robust logic. AI helps us develop this logic more efficiently, make knowledge more readily available and align solutions more quickly with specific requirements.
What Does This Mean for Our Customers?
The targeted use of AI opens up potential along the entire digital sales process: from faster preparation of complex requirements and more efficient configuration and quotation processes to the automated creation and use of CAD and product data. For us, the key point is not using AI for its own sake, but the concrete benefit: shorter processes, consistently high quality and solutions that remain manageable and scalable even for complex products.
Innovation Day showed that we are not observing AI from a distance, but testing it precisely where our solutions for digital B2B sales actually come into being.
We will continue developing the most promising approaches from the workshops, transfer them into concrete pilots and examine step by step what measurable added value they create for our products, services and internal processes. We are convinced that AI will noticeably change the way digital B2B sales and product configuration work in the future. We want to actively help shape this change — responsibly and with a clear focus on the added value for our customers.
A heartfelt thank-you to everyone who made the day what it was with their ideas, questions and energy. Now it is about consistently following up on the approaches that emerged and putting them into practice.
