Krones is overall winner of the Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award 2026

Krones AG has been honoured as the Overall Winner of the Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award (MIMA) 2026, receiving one of the most prestigious accolades for digital industrial innovation. The award is presented annually by Microsoft and the strategy consultancy Roland Berger and recognises companies that set pioneering impulses for industrial value creation through digital solutions and new technologies.

Krones was recognised for developing a new generation of Agentic Digital Twins – digital twins that not only map production processes but are also able to optimise them autonomously using artificial intelligence. The underlying solution was initially validated successfully in a test environment and will be transferred into a scalable application in the next step.

Learning and optimising in real time

The technology combines highly accurate real time physical simulations with AI supported analytics and decision-making. This enables production scenarios to be evaluated within minutes, whereas such simulations previously took several hours. The AI automatically tests different settings, continuously learns from them, and transfers the optimal results directly to real production systems. This makes production more efficient, stable, and resource saving – a significant advancement, particularly for the beverage industry.

“The award demonstrates the potential that lies in combining digitalisation and artificial intelligence – and shows that, together with our mechanical engineering expertise, we are creating innovations that set international benchmarks,” explains Markus Tischer, Member of the Executive Board at Krones with responsibility for digitalization.

The award winning project was developed in close collaboration with Ansys (part of Synopsys), CADFEM, Microsoft, NVIDIA and SoftServe. Together, they created a fully integrated solution that combines simulation, AI and cloud technology into a powerful tool for the production of the future.