German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visits Beckhoff Automation at Hannover Messe
During the traditional opening tour of Hannover Messe on April 20, 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited Beckhoff Automation, a high-tech company. At the Verl-based family company's booth, its founder and Managing Director Hans Beckhoff, together with his children Frederike Beckhoff and Johannes Beckhoff, provided exciting insights into how artificial intelligence is being implemented in industrial production.
This year, the world's leading exhibition for industry opened its doors in the capital of Lower Saxony under the motto "Think tech forward". The Federal Chancellor was accompanied by a delegation of around 50 other guests, including his wife Charlotte Merz, Katherina Reiche, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy (CDU), Olaf Lies, the Minister-President of Lower Saxony (SPD), and Valdis Dombrovskis, Commissioner for Economy and Productivity at the European Commission, along with around 100 journalists. Frederike Beckhoff, Corporate Development at Beckhoff Automation, welcomed the guests and introduced them to the family-run technology company, the principle of PC-based control, and the products required for this, as well as the fields of application for automation technology.
Federal Chancellor welcomes Brazil, partner country to Hannover Messe, with physical AI
Johannes Beckhoff, Product Management at Beckhoff Automation, then presented Beckhoff's key topic for Hannover Messe 2026 to the visitors: the fusion of artificial intelligence and classic machine control as the basis for physical AI. He showed how machine programming and control itself can be executed by AI using a technology demo in which pieces with numbers and letters could be moved by ATRO, the modular industrial robot. The AI runs completely locally in the machine, independent of cloud services. "This means that the machine operators have sovereignty over the AI and also over their data," says Johannes Beckhoff.
The Federal Chancellor entered a text command into the AI, which is integrated into the TwinCAT automation software, telling it to create a greeting for Brazil, the partner country for Hannover Messe, from the letters in the demonstrator. The AI then executed the task by giving a real-time command to the robot via the control system: form the words "Bom dia Brasil" (Hello Brazil). Johannes Beckhoff explains: "We've given the machine a real brain. This machine brain illustrates how AI not only generates text or images, but can also interact with the physical world." This application showed the guests that LLMs (large language models) moved out of the chat window a long time ago and can now intervene in real movement sequences. Beckhoff has truly proved that physical AI will fundamentally change the industry and holds immense potential for machine and system development.
