A hundred and thirty three years--that's how long Virginia-based Newport News Shipbuilding has been in the business of manufacturing ships. As the sole developer of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, the company has constructed more than 30 warships, including the world's first and largest nuclear-powered carrier, which weighs 100,000 tons and comprises 300 million parts. Traditionally, building a ship like this might require 30 million to 40 million man-hours. Digital transformation has upended the ship building business, said Bharat Amin, VP and chief information officer at Newport News Shipbuilding, on stage at Siemens' Spotlight on Innovation, an annual technology conference held recently in Orlando. "You hear about smart cities, we want to be a smart shipyard," Amin told the audience.

As fears of artificial intelligence replacing human workers grows, some companies are focusing on the people who make the brands work. Heather Brunner of WP Engine and Barbara Humpton of Siemens USA emphasized the need for changing education, investment in current employees, and rethinking prerequisites that were once considered sacrosanct. Brunner, for instance, noted that WP Engine has removed its college degree requirement and is partnering with more community colleges, workforce development agencies, and coding programs in universities to train its talent. Both women noted that AI isn't going away, but that doesn't necessarily mean humans won't be a critical factor anymore. "The key question people keep asking us is, 'Are we transforming humans out of the equation?' And the answer is'no, we're elevating the role of the human. We're finding out what is truly humanly possible'," Humpton said Tuesday at Fortune's Most Powerful Women International Summit in Montreal.

This week in Princeton, New Jersey, Siemens brought together several hundred technologists, from inside the company to partners and media, to share some expected updates about the accelerated evolution of their work in artificial intelligence (AI) and the "rise of autonomous systems." After nearly 200 years in existence, and several decades of developing everything from smart factory robotics (starting in their own manufacturing facilities) to intelligent machines and connected manufacturing systems, the company has most recently been reaching out to build tech ecosystems with an open embrace, while also working more intensely with universities, government agencies, start-ups, and entrepreneurs. Siemens has long been considered one of the world's top companies in industrial and B2B technologies and has been developing software before the world understood what software was and would mean, long before Industry 4.0 became "a thing." The thing is, while Siemens is one of the world's top ten largest software companies, it is under-recognized for its work in Industrial IoT and the software, systems and networks that make manufacturing more efficient and companies more profitable. The Siemens team, including a number of incredibly bright and passionate engineering experts, recent PhDs, data scientists and industry experts, enthusiastically shared demos across digital remote services using VR glasses and computer vision software, an "Ag Pod" developed to address the global food shortage, voice control car tech, autonomous power restoration for energy grids, and 3-D printing for the "on-demand" economy.