KION joins NVIDIA and Accenture to transform supply chains

KION Group, a global leader in supply chain solutions, has teamed up with NVIDIA and Accenture to optimise supply chains by harnessing advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and simulation technologies.

Unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2025, this collaboration showcases how state-of-the-art digital twins and AI-driven robotics are redefining warehouse operations and logistics.

Central to this initiative is Mega, an NVIDIA Omniverse blueprint designed for large-scale industrial digital twins. By integrating physical AI—AI models that emulate principles of the physical world—Mega enables enhanced performance in intelligent warehouses equipped with automated forklifts, smart cameras, and cutting-edge robotics.

“At KION, we leverage AI-driven solutions as an integral part of our strategy to optimize our customers’ supply chains and increase their productivity,” said Rob Smith, CEO of KION GROUP AG.

“With NVIDIA’s AI leadership and Accenture’s expertise in digital technologies, we are reinventing warehouse automation. Bringing these strong partners together, we are creating a vision for future warehouses that are part of a smart agile system, evolve with the world around them, and can handle nearly any supply chain challenge. This collaboration underscores our commitment to innovation and pushing the boundaries of industrial automation to usher in a new era of supply chain efficiency.”

Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture, highlighted the significance of modernising supply chains:

“This collaboration with our long-term client KION and partner NVIDIA will break exciting new ground in not only reinventing the warehouse, but also in raising their performance standards with technology, data and AI, helping our clients operate autonomous, safe supply chains that better serve their customers and consumers, enhance productivity and efficiency and create new value.”

NVIDIA’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, emphasised the transformative potential of the collaboration:

“Future warehouses will function like massive autonomous robots, orchestrating fleets of robots within them. By integrating Omniverse and Mega into their solutions, KION and Accenture can dramatically accelerate the development of industrial AI and autonomy for the world’s distribution and logistics ecosystem.”

AI-powered digital twins: The future of warehousing

Modern warehouses are intricate ecosystems of workers, autonomous vehicles, and automated systems. Managing these environments requires precision and adaptability, challenges further complicated by fluctuating demand and dynamic inventory requirements.

Using NVIDIA Omniverse and Mega, KION is developing digital twins that enable warehouse operators to design efficient and safe configurations without disrupting operations. These digital replicas simulate facility layouts, robot behaviour, and worker interactions, allowing for:

Optimised configurations: Testing various setups to balance robots, workers, and automation equipment for maximum efficiency.
Enhanced training: Virtual robots adapt to changing conditions like demand spikes and inventory shifts, planning and refining tasks through AI-powered simulations.
Continuous improvement: Integrated with KION’s warehouse management software, digital twins assign tasks, execute them virtually, and refine real-world operations based on simulated results.

At CES 2025, Accenture showcased an interactive application that tracks how digital twins enhance warehouse key performance indicators (KPIs) such as throughput, safety, and error rates.

Next steps: Real-time insights and resilient systems

The partnership aims to integrate digital twins with vision-language models to provide real-time insights from warehouses. By leveraging NVIDIA’s NIM services for deploying AI models to edge devices, cameras and robots can detect and address bottlenecks, accidents, and other potential issues in real time. This creates a safer, more efficient environment where humans and machines collaborate seamlessly.

The result is a future-proof supply chain ecosystem that anticipates challenges, adapts dynamically, and generates actionable insights for operators. These innovations promise to deliver warehouses that are not only highly efficient but also resilient and adaptable to the ever-evolving demands of global commerce.

As this groundbreaking collaboration unfolds, it marks a pivotal step toward redefining supply chains through the convergence of AI, robotics, and digital twins.