Keynote speaker
Annual Summit
The Paradigm Shift in Global Manufacturing: From Digital Twin to Direct Customer Value
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01Industrial AI · Manufacturing · Leadership
Building intelligence that works where manufacturing happens.
I’m Steven Gao, co-founder and CEO of IndustrialMind.ai, building and speaking about AI that works on the factory floor.
On stage & in conversation
Ideas tested in the rooms where industry gathers.
Selected keynotes, curated tracks and interviews on how industrial AI moves from possibility to operating reality. Open an engagement for the full context and related coverage.
01Featured guest
Handelsblatt Disrupt
Will AI soon solve the problems you had to solve at Tesla?
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02Track curator
QCon Shanghai 2025
The Manufacturing Revolution Driven by Large Models
View engagement ↗Curated conference track · Mandarin03Featured speaker
ThinkInAI · AI Technology Night
A Global View of Industrial AI
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STARTUP AUTOBAHN · ARENA2036
Deep Industrial Knowledge and the Next Chapter of Manufacturing
View engagement ↗Co-founder story · English05Also participating in Antler Embark US and the Gestamp digital manufacturing ecosystem.
Speaking · Industrial AI · Thoughtful collaboration
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For a talk, interview or serious industrial AI conversation, leave your email and I’ll get back to you personally.
Selected thinking
Notes from the intersection of AI and industry.
Short, direct observations shaped by building systems, working with manufacturers and operating across different industrial cultures.
01
German industry
Buying a German Company Sounds Like an Opportunity. Running It Is the Hard Part.
Germany’s succession wave is attracting entrepreneurs. Before buying, I would want to understand how much of the business will still work when its owner stops coming in.
02
Entrepreneurship
Your Next Startup Might Be a 50-Year-Old German Company
An established product, paying customers and an owner ready to retire. Why I see Germany’s succession wave as a starting point for a new generation of entrepreneurs.
03
Industrial AI
From TECH 2026 in Germany: The Next Competitive Advantage Is Not AI, It’s Industrial Knowledge
Reflections from TECH 2026 on industrial knowledge, engineering expertise and why better outcomes matter more than the AI model itself.
04
Causal AI
What causal AI taught me—even when I stopped believing the hype
I went looking for a machine that could explain cause and effect. What I found was a better discipline for asking industrial questions.
About Steven
Engineer by training. Operator by experience. Co-founder by conviction.
Steven Gao (Zhitao Gao) is the co-founder and CEO of IndustrialMind.ai, building AI manufacturing engineers for factories around the world.
His perspective combines his experience as a founding leader of Digital Transformation at Tesla's Gigafactory, years spent studying and working in Germany, and practical work scaling manufacturing intelligence across regions.
He focuses on a practical question: how can AI understand complex engineering work well enough to make people and factories meaningfully better?