At Critical Manufacturing’s MES & Industry 4.0 Summit in Porto, keynote speaker Walker Reynolds warned that most manufacturers still treat Excel as their MES and ignore the architecture that will define AI-driven operations. Without a unified strategy, Europe risks losing its industrial future.
The mood in European boardrooms remains cautious. Executives speak earnestly about transformation, but action is elusive. While other regions scale industrial AI and modernise their operations from edge to cloud, Europe is dangerously stagnant. For Walker Reynolds, President and Solutions Architect at 4.0 Solutions, the numbers are not merely concerning, they are an outright alarm.
“Let me be clear,” he states. “The European Union is dead last in digital transformation. Antarctica is ahead. That is not hyperbole, that is data. We benchmark across 2,000 companies globally, and Europe is disproportionately represented in the lowest digital maturity tier. These are organisations operating in the dark.”
The data exposes an uncomfortable truth: the continent that once led the industrial revolution is now trailing every developed, and many undeveloped, regions in its readiness for the next one. The source of the problem, according to Reynolds, is not capability but culture.
“There are brilliant engineers in Europe. Some of the best in the world. But also the most arrogant. The hubris is breathtaking,” he adds. “When you are convinced that your existing systems are sophisticated enough, you cannot see that the rest of the world has moved on.”
This is not speculation. During his keynote at the MES & Industry 4.0 Summit in Porto, Reynolds asked the audience how many were actively involved in digital transformation. Barely half raised their hands. In the United States, China, or India, the same question sees a 100 per cent response rate.
“That should terrify you. Fifty per cent in 2025 is an industrial death sentence,” he warns. “If this were a factory safety meeting and only half the people followed procedures, heads would roll. But when it is digital infrastructure, we shrug.”
MES is not a module, it is the frontline
The confusion over digital priorities runs deep. European manufacturers continue to focus on ERP upgrades, pilot projects, or one-off integrations. Meanwhile, the critical layer where digital transformation must begin, MES, is neglected or misunderstood. “Production is the only thing that matters. Safety, quality, even AI, these are only relevant if they serve production. And production lives in the MES,” Reynolds states.
The reality is stark. Fewer than 10 per cent of global manufacturers operate with a digital MES. The majority rely on Excel spreadsheets, paper-based workflows, or legacy software patched together with macros and manual updates. That is not transformation. That is stagnation disguised as control.
“Microsoft Excel is still the number one MES on the planet. That is a damning indictment of where we are. And if transformation starts in MES, and it does, then the majority of the world is not even on the starting line,” he adds. The MES layer is the hardest to get right. SCADA is formulaic. ERP is rigid. MES is where business logic meets operational complexity. It is where digital solutions succeed or fail based on whether they empower operators or obstruct them.
“If you make the operator’s job harder, you fail. That is non-negotiable,” Reynolds insists. “If the tool you implement becomes the excuse for not producing, it becomes the problem—not the solution.”
Unified namespace is the only viable foundation
For many organisations, transformation becomes an endless cycle of vendor demos, system integrations and dashboarding projects that never scale. The missing piece is not a lack of technology, but a lack of architectural thinking.
At the core of 4.0 Solutions’ approach is the concept of the unified namespace (UNS). Unlike traditional architectures that hardwire systems together or rely on brittle APIs, the UNS is a real-time, semantically structured infrastructure into which every system publishes and from which every system consumes. “UNS is not a software product. It is an architecture. And it mirrors how a business thinks: semantically, hierarchically, and in real time,” says Reynolds. “It is the foundation for any serious digital strategy.”
In a properly structured UNS, every asset, every value, every message is organised using a schema that humans and machines can understand. It creates a living representation of the business that grows and evolves as the organisation scales. And critically, it decouples systems so changes in one area do not break another.
He offers a real-world example. In one case, a manufacturer digitised a 2017 Excel-based job jacket using UNS principles. Instead of predefined APIs or fixed object templates, the team built a functional namespace that ingested and served real-time data dynamically. The result was a system that was self-aware, flexible, and transparent. “That is what transformation looks like. It is not flashy. It is not a chatbot. It is a factory knowing what it is doing at every moment,” Reynolds explains.
Europe is not ready for AI and that is the problem
The hype around AI agents, generative models, and large-scale automation is deafening. But Reynolds argues that Europe is not remotely ready to deploy these technologies, not because the models are immature, but because the infrastructure to support them does not exist. “We are five to eight years away from mainstream AI agent deployment. Not because the tech is not ready. The tech is racing ahead. It is because businesses are not digitally fluent enough to use it,” he says.
He draws a timeline that should embarrass any industrial executive. MQTT, the protocol that underpins most real-time IoT messaging, was invented in 1998. Most manufacturers only adopted it after 2015. And it was not until 2020 that many even began to explore its use. “The same delay is happening with AI,” he adds. “Everyone jumped on ChatGPT in 2022, but very few have translated that playtime into real value. The gap is architectural fluency. If you cannot define what digital transformation is, you are not ready for AI.”
At the heart of AI integration lies the same truth: production is king. AI that does not improve yield, uptime, throughput or responsiveness is digital theatre. The only meaningful metric is whether intelligence, artificial or otherwise, makes the plant smarter and faster.
Europe’s existential choice
The pace of industrial competition is unforgiving. Tesla builds gigafactories in nine months. Their production cycle time is 33 seconds. Amazon predicts customer purchases six weeks in advance. These companies do not win because of scale or capital. They win because of data.
“Tesla is not a car company. The car is just a sensor. Their real product is data,” Reynolds explains. “Their insurance margins are the highest in the industry because they use telemetry to price risk in real time. That is what manufacturing in the fifth industrial revolution looks like.”
This revolution has already begun. Reynolds argues it started in November 2022, with the release of ChatGPT and the convergence of human and artificial intelligence. But while the tools now exist, most manufacturers remain stuck in outdated systems and mentalities. “You cannot bolt AI onto a paper-based process and call it transformation. And you cannot wait for the EU to legislate your way to competitiveness,” he says. “Europe must decide: do you want to lead or follow? Because at the moment, you are not even running.”
Reynolds does not shy away from provocation. But his message is not nihilistic. It is urgent, deliberate and clear. The architecture exists. The method is known. The tools are proven. What is missing is resolve.
“Digital transformation is not about dashboards or data lakes,” he concludes. “It is about converting your business into a system that gets smarter over time. And that starts with MES. That starts with a unified namespace. That starts now, or it may not happen at all.”
