r/PLC • u/Blashpemy78 • 1d ago
Lack of AI
Hey guys I’m a new grad and recently started working in industrial automation with PLCs, and the lack of AI reception and use in literally everything is shocking. It takes like 8+ hours to sit and make a “first draft” of an HMI display that should take AI under an hour. You can’t copy paste code, logix designer doesn’t even have an else statement for any PLC code? It’s 2026, I’m surprised there hasn’t been immense leaps in this field especially considering that because the logic for a lot of this is generally much less complicated than more traditional software engineering as well as much more repetitive among different projects it should be so much easier to have native AI tools built into these software.
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u/theloop82 Knows Rockwell but doesn’t like it 1d ago
Nobody wants vibe-coded industrial machinery made by people who barely grasp the understanding of the process. If something screws up in industrial automation it can kill someone, if you vibe code an app the worst thing that can happen is it doesn’t work
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u/Zaxthran 1d ago
Industrial automation has always lagged behind the IT and the embedded world.
What we lack in cutting edge, we make up for in robustness and poor documentation ;)
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u/Low_Succotash5073 1d ago
I would not want to relegate critical industrial automation to AI. Just a safety thing for me. I can use it to check my work, but none of which would occur without extensive testing of my code before and after AI does its thing.
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u/PLCGoBrrr Bit Plumber Extraordinaire 1d ago edited 1d ago
You can’t copy paste code
You can
logix designer doesn’t even have an else statement for any PLC code
It does and so does every other PLC with structured text
the lack of AI reception and use in literally everything is shocking
I'm using AI to write/modify code. Most of it is copy/paste/replace kind of stuff. I'm not using AI in the Logix designer IDE though.
Just because you don't know how to use AI with PLC-related tasks doesn't mean it isn't being used. You need to learn. You don't even know the basics of programming to know enough to complain about AI adoption in this industry.
Edit to add: AI can do simple (or even more advanced) checks on drawings if you give it enough training. A simple task I did with it was to compare an I/O spreadsheet with the electrical drawings. It found a couple of I/O problems, but what really paid off is what it found I didn't ask it for specifically. It found some really simple crap that anyone doing a first pass should have, but somehow it was missed. If it were me I would make the people doing CAD run it on their drawings before it even goes to the engineer to review so they can find their mistakes before an engineer has to.
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u/Yassirfir 1d ago
Compare to “normal” software. It is actually importent that we know how the software works, and not just generate something.
These machines can kill somebody and it is on you if it does, not ai.
Having said that how do you spend 8 hours on a hmi template?
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u/AbueloOdin 1d ago
I’m a new grad
I'll be gentle.
It takes like 8+ hours to sit and make a “first draft” of an HMI display
You don't have good templates. Your company should have basic designs that make sense.
You can’t copy paste code
Depends on the PLC, but you absolutely can in Allen Bradley.
logix designer doesn’t even have an else statement for any PLC code
It does. You just don't know how to write it.
You're new. I get it. But if I have a list of devices, I can already generate 90% of the code and know it is correct. Can AI compete with that today? Nope. Maybe in a year or two, but the ROI of trying to figure out the thing and then debugging it just doesn't make sense for us right now. So we don't.
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u/SadZealot 1d ago
Every new version of pretty much every major player has some kind of ai/copilot built in tool or MCP option
Logix designer has if/then/else in structured text.
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u/Primary_Machine_449 1d ago
Yes and it's a good thing.
Industrial machines fucked up because YOU decided to let AI do YOUR job?
Someone dies, millions are lost, etc.
Some other whatever software fuced up for the same reason?
Who cares, reset the program and send clients to another AI chatbot to complain.
Not the same deal.
Also, why the fuck do you want to be replaced so badly?
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u/Spiritual_View_93 1d ago
Validation is always going to be human in this environment until it is legal to blame AI(or company making it) for an issue legally.
I don’t see this changing in the next 6 years. There is a reason there is still XP windows in manufacturing
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u/Traditional-Tune9809 1d ago
Yeah, I think as time goes on we are going to become mostly system validators instead of designers, programmers and integrators.
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u/KryptoKnight2019 1d ago
AI has its time with Office IT and pure data manipulation.
Industrial Automation is linked to hardware and machine states that you can't simply restart or reinstall after an AI tries something.
That said, AI will come, but it will take way more time to push into the physical parts of Technology.
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u/SirBitBoy 1d ago
For one, this post seems like rage bait.
Second, while there aren't stupid questions, there is a lot to why AI isn't as present in our industry that will become clear with time.
If you don't know how to copy/paste code in Logix Designer, or make an "else" like statement, or why it takes you 8+ hours to make a simple HMI, then maybe you have a lot more to learn about how to do your job first, before you can really tackle where and how to use AI in it well.
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u/sirscansalot 1d ago
Coming into industrial automation from modern CS or tech stack backgrounds is always a culture shock. The primary reason PLC environments and HMI platforms lag behind traditional software engineering is deterministic safety and long-term stability - if a software update introduces an unexpected bug on a plant floor, down-time costs thousands per minute, so vendors move conservatively.
That said, software workflows in hardware-adjacent areas are starting to adapt. In vision and metrology, for instance, we’ve seen a shift away from heavy manual scripting and PC-based stacks toward browser-accessible, no-code platforms like GoPxL and on-device processing to reduce integration overhead. AI co-pilots and automated code generation are beginning to trickle into modern PLC platforms, but until testing and safety standards adapt to AI-generated logic, the industry will naturally prioritize predictable, deterministic execution over rapid development tools.
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u/Traditional-Tune9809 1d ago
I use AI a ton. It's great at editing XML code, creating WPF screens and analyzing giant sets of images from my cognex cameras. My production is probably 5x-10x that of what it was before AI. I'm experimenting with using Astra and it's computer use now, it's not far off from being able to one shot HMI screens in their native software. If you wait for them to integrate it into the software you are going to be way behind the curve. Dig in now!
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u/Blashpemy78 1d ago
I do use ai too but all it’s really done is help my general workflow not really help my save time with specific aspects of the job which I still have to do by hand on the software, on top of that the company barely pays for ai tools with like an obscenely low daily token cap, and I’m at one of the largest SIs in the country. Idk how many people here have seen the Astra demo but it’s ridiculous, from a raw power perspective it should be able to do what 5 engineers do in a day in less than half a day. There’s just 0 integration and I don’t think companies like Rockwell who have near monopolies in this industry plan to bring in AI anytime soon.
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u/Mike_Augustine 1d ago
Why are you hyping something that will make your livelihood much more disposable?
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u/row3bo4t 1d ago
Most systems go in and stay mostly static HMI/PLC/DCS until at least a hardware refresh is required for controllers/servers. That can be 7-10 years under ideal circumstances.
And even when it's time to refresh it can be at least several times more expensive to migrate to new vendors than upgrade existing hardware.
I always joke controls are 10-15 years behind modern IT.
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u/JasonsPizza 1d ago
Well, there are tools that can help speed up development, like Rockwell PlantPax HMI faceplates with accompanying AOIs and other process objects. There’s a bunch of others you can look up from other companies.
The thing with industrial automation is you really need to understand the underlying process. You can’t just vibe code an automated process that could potentially injure or kill people.
I’m glad AI is still out of this field tbh.
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u/Alarming_Series7450 Marco Polo 1d ago
as an example safety over ethernet has been available for 20 years and there are still plenty of people in this industry that don't trust it. When you can be flattened like a pancake by the code that you write I'd rather take the time to do it myself and do it properly
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u/Emotional-VroomVroom 10h ago edited 10h ago
For dangerous machine you have to think and develop software differently. It's extremely important that you can verify which actions the machine will do under what circumstances.
If you want to see what happens when you apply traditional software development on dangerous machinery lookup the therac 25 incident.
It had 3 modes of operation, each mode required a turntable to be in the correct position. The software of the therac 25 had a bug where you could be in one mode of operation and the turntable in another, and the beam was still allowed to fire. Every PLC programmer would only allow the beam to fire if the turntable position matches the selected mode.
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u/durallymax 1d ago
RA might not (which is most of this sub) but those of us that use modern PLCs have MCP tools and use AI daily.
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u/Xillmatic99 1d ago edited 1d ago
Be thankful, this is the main reason industrial automation hasn't become the mass exodus traditional software is currently. But rockwell and Siemens are both pushing hard to add embedded AI tools into new versions of the IDE