Scaling Trusted Analytics and Automation at Siemens Energy

Hey everyone. We're back here at Inspire 2026 Alteryx User Conference up in the lovely JW Marriott in Orlando. And we're actually having lunch, and I ran into this gentleman, and I invited him to bring his lunch with me into our studio here, and we're going to do something we don't do all the time, but it's a lunch date interview.

I want to introduce you to Alex Gross from Siemens. Alex, welcome to Techstrong TV. It's great having you on here.

Thanks for having me. So, first of all, I don't want to interrupt lunch, so I'll talk if you want to eat a little bit, and I'll try to make sure you swallow your food before I ask you to answer a question. Yes.

But Alex, I mentioned you're at Siemens. Give us a little bit of your background. What do you do at Siemens, how long you've been there, other things you've done?

Yeah. Before I came to Siemens, I started at a couple Alteryx partner companies. So I was a consultant working, for example, for Siemens as well, or Siemens Energy to be precise.

We're two companies. Mm-hmm. And roughly three years ago, I switched to Siemens permanently, and I became sort of the business administrator of the Alteryx ecosystem together with a colleague.

So we are the counterpart to the IT, trying to manage our 2,500 users that we have currently. We're still growing a little bit, but we already exploded when I joined from 800 to 1,500, then to 2,000, now 2,500. I think we have a couple more hundred users that we can onboard to Alteryx.

So it's an interesting journey and ride so far. I come from a computer science background, so it was really easy for me to pick up Alteryx once I got hooked. Yeah.

I feel like it's like the entry-level drug. " I came from coding. I knew Python, I knew SQL.

" But when I realized how easy it is, I was like, "Wait a second. " I can just drop a couple jewels. Oh, good.

Don't worry about the rest. Excellent. So you mentioned 2,500 users.

That's a sizable- ... that's not just a couple of people playing around. Yes.

Can you give us maybe a little bit of the history of the Alteryx-Siemens partnership here? Yeah. So we started, as you said, just with I think one or two users.

Some colleague in the US picked it up first, and they directly showed it in one of our use cases to a German, and this guy brought it over in 2016 to Germany already. And then we had the first 10 users, the first 20, 30. It grew pretty slowly in the beginning, and I think we hit the turning point right somewhere in 2020, where then we got another 600 licenses and just said, "Okay.

Let's have a go. " It's called adoption package. So you basically get 600 licenses for a really cheap amount of money, let's call it extended trial.

And we're just handing them out everywhere and like, "Play around with it. If you find it nice, if you have use cases, tell us about it," because again, obviously we need to buy the license and make some benefit out of the software as well. So, but yeah, it was really interesting.

And so far it's been an interesting journey. A lot of challenges, but a lot of interesting ones, I would say. Absolutely.

Hey, have some lunch. I'm going to talk a little bit about what you were talking about. You know what, it's interesting you say 2020, because that's also when COVID hit, right?

And all of a sudden, well, besides the catastrophe of people being sick and then dying, but it also kind of forced a lot of companies to accelerate their digital transformation projects. Because with everyone working remotely, we didn't have the luxury of rolling it out leisurely over time. If we were going to keep the lights on at companies, we had to be rolling out, we had to give people the functionality.

Yes. So I would imagine that COVID probably, or the effects of COVID on business, probably had a lot to do with that rapid inflation of adoption around that timeframe. I would say so too.

I also started during that time myself, and- Yeah ... it was great. In one way or another way, COVID helped- COVID wasn't great, but it brought a lot of great things- Yes ...

in terms of technology, right? It boosted me a lot because we had the lockdowns, and I just learned Alteryx 12 hours a day. Because what would I do?

I like the tool. I used it at work for eight hours, and then I just went to the Alteryx community after work and was like, "Okay, let me explore what other people are doing," because I got really hooked with it. And- Well, let me just be upfront, though.

Alteryx is not paying you to say this. No. But you wanted to do it 12 hours a day.

Yes. Wonderful. Some hours, some days even longer.

Uh-huh. I woke up and had my breakfast on the computer, looked at the tool, and just, I answered a couple of community questions because I was a new consultant to the business. " And I looked at the Alteryx community and was like, "That's a perfect playground for me to look at real problems, real user challenges," and I just answered as many questions as I wanted.

We founded the German user group, or actually the user group for the DACH region, so Germany, Austria, Switzerland. Mm-hmm. And then- Yeah.

It's great ... just started flying. But they didn't pay me back then.

My boss was paying me. Yeah. He was forcing me to learn, but I enjoyed it so much that I kept going after work.

You probably would've done it for free, right? Don't tell him that, though. Alex, of course, 2020 was interesting times, 2021, all of that, COVID times as we call it.

But now we're in this new AI era, right? And it's changing- Yes ... so quickly, agentics, and I was just in the press and analyst briefing and getting a preview of some of the new functionality, new products, new agents- Yes ...

that Alteryx is rolling out. What's your take on it? I hope they catch up.

I'm using agents all day already. You are? Yes.

So we started also late, in my opinion. We started around February, March-ish, and since then it's been game-changing. It's like my second Alteryx moment when it comes to like, I work 12 hours because I really enjoyed all the functionalities, all the features, and we actually built some of the functionality that Alteryx is showing- Oh, really?

ourselves as well. We had the same last year when we won the award. They made the tool basically out of what we did internally already, so we're trying to stay ahead of the curve a little bit.

So it's good to see that Alteryx is also developing this because in the end, we are a bunch of solo developers, small teams, and obviously if they have 20, 50 people behind this- Makes a big difference ... they make faster progress than we do. Yeah, makes a big difference.

And we have still a day-to-day job. Absolutely. Well, yeah, there is that pesky fact you got to make it live.

Yes. But it's interesting you say you started late, you didn't start till February or March. I think it's still not late if you're starting now.

I think we got to remember, you- Yes ... you're sort of a classic early adopter. Yep, I hope so.

No, and it is. Most of the people watching this, they're still trying to decide what to do, where to do it, how to do it. So I don't think you started late at all.

But the other thing is though is the, one of the fellows on my team, we also went through our own agentic kind of experimentations and also around March. Okay. Around March.

Good timing. And I remember asking one of the guys, he's the fellow who runs our webinar platforms. Mm-hmm.

" "I can't wait- It is like this ... " And what he had already built within a couple of days, but then what he was mapping out to build, and he's still building, it really is just mind- Eye-opening ... yeah, it's mind-blowing.

Mind-blowing. You've had a chance to walk around here a little bit. What are you hearing from the other attendees who are here?

I think most of them, I had the same question when us two months ago, three months ago, where it's like it's all, I'm not sure if I am allowed to say b******t, cut it out if it's not. No, this is an adult show. You could say a few.

Yeah. " And honestly, most of that is b******t. In my take, you actually need to look at what generates value, and- Right ...

a lot of the AI stuff that I see, people use it because the managers say so. And that's the reason why we didn't use it for such a long time, because it was not bringing a lot of value to us. Now with the agents that we are currently having, they actually bring value.

We use them on a day-to-day basis to inspect issues that we're having, like take a look at hundreds of log files and tell me what's the pattern across all the logs. Really simple. Or I just enter your name and say, "Give me a report for Alan in the last seven days.

" And I get a custom report just for you in a unique design usually, because I don't care about the design. I care about the overall patterns. It makes my life so much easier as an admin as well, because I don't need to worry about do I write a SQL query?

Do I start a new Alteryx workflow? If it's a one-time issue, it's always annoying. If you have issues every day, I build an Alteryx workflow for it, but I don't know what the future issue will be.

Right. " I told you earlier, we have 2,500 users. We run 14,000 workflows each day.

Wow. Oh my God. So, there's a couple issues today- No, I would imagine at that volume, what do you expect?

And that's phenomenal. Phenomenal. Yeah.

So 14,000 workflows each day- Of workflow ... 5 users. Yes.

Yes. At least you do the math. That's a lot of workflows per user.

Yes. It's not all- Per day ... it's a lot of, 14,000 workflow runs.

It's some- Runs, not unique. Yeah. I have a workflow that runs every half an hour to do some administrative tasks.

I think unique- Unique ... workflows, it's still like 800, 1,200 or probably more. I would need to check the numbers.

Yeah, no, that's- I would probably even go ask my agent and say, "Hey- They could tell you ... tell me about- How many workflows ... " Fantastic.

What's the most exciting thing you've heard here so far? Or what you're looking forward to hearing maybe? We're currently on the ACE developer days, so- Okay ...

seeing a little bit of sneak peek what's coming the next days and what's on the roadmap for the next couple of months. I'm not allowed to say them here yet, but there's some good stuff coming that I would like to try. So I've signed up for a couple pilot programs, and yeah, I'm hoping to get some access soon so we can connect this to our agents and, yeah, really see.

Well, we'll have to come back and have you back on and hear more about it then. I will be back next year wherever the conference is. So I've been at all the conferences since they launched it after COVID- Really?

again. After COVID. Yeah.

Before that, I didn't use Alteryx, so- That's why you weren't here, right ... but I was in Vegas three times. I was in Denver, I was in Amsterdam, so.

Amsterdam's a great place for a conference, too. I've been there a few times, and one of my colleagues is there now. And it's close for me as a European.

Well, for you, it's, yeah, it's European. Well, it's funny you mentioned, I was just in Vienna about three weeks ago. Me too.

Oh, really? Yeah. I was in Graz, and I was flying through Vienna.

Oh, no, I was in Prague. Also nice one. Prague, beautiful city.

Well, I was there for another conference, and then I always wanted to go to Vienna, so we took the train from Prague to Vienna. That's what I like about the European system, with the trains. You don't have that here in the US.

Yeah. Well, no, we don't. Well, I could tell you- I think you had them.

It's just untouched ... yes, we do. I looked into taking a train here because I live in South Florida.

The economics of it was so ridiculously upside down that I couldn't justify it. Yeah. I've seen that.

But anyway, Alex, enjoy your lunch. Yeah. Thank you for coming on here with us.

We appreciate you taking time and- Mm-hmm ... I hope you keep enjoying- I hope so ... what you've heard about Alteryx.

Yes. Thank you. All right.

Hey, we're going to let Alex finish lunch. I'm going to have lunch myself, but thank you for sitting in on our lunch here at Inspire 2026. We're going to have more.

Stay tuned.