Once upon a time, everything passed through the HMI.
It was the face of the machine, the sole point of interaction, the window into performance, alarms, and manual control. But today, in a world shaped by APIs, dashboards, edge computing, and remote diagnostics, the user interface is no longer tied to a single screen. It is layered, distributed and sometimes, invisible.
To explore this shift, we asked our LinkedIn community a simple but loaded question:
Is the HMI still the “face” of the machine? Or are we looking elsewhere?
📊 The responses have been:
- 47%: Still the main interface
- 13%: Now it’s infrastructure
- 40%: Depends on system type
- 0%: Other
Let’s unpack what this means and why it matters.
The interface remains for now.
Nearly half of respondents (47%) continue to see the HMI as the primary user interface. That makes sense as it still delivers what matters: visibility and control. On the shop floor, where immediacy, tactile interaction and situational awareness are critical, a physical screen remains unmatched.
As Control Engineering has noted, “The HMI remains essential for local feedback and manual overrides, especially in environments where uptime is critical and safety cannot be compromised”.
In other words, in high-stakes environments, operators want something they can see, touch, and trust. The physical presence of an HMI is also reassuring. It offers an intuitive focal point, a known interface that signals ownership, accessibility, and readiness. For many, it is not just a screen, it is a symbol of control: here is the machine, and this is how you interact with it.
Is Infrastructure the new interface?
A growing minority of respondents (13%) believe the HMI has effectively dissolved into the system architecture.
In these cases, the “interface” may be:
- A cloud dashboard accessible from a browser,
- An API integration that feeds data into MES or ERP,
- A remote-edged client managing multiple lines in parallel.
This reflects a deeper industry trend: the interface is no longer something you touch, but something that connects. In fact, this trend reflects a broader evolution in automation: the rise of headless systems, where the primary interaction layer is abstracted away from the machine and embedded in the logic of interconnected platforms.
As Schneider Electric points out, “HMIs are evolving beyond traditional panels into distributed, cloud-based tools that support a broader, real-time operations model”.
In this paradigm, the interface becomes an orchestrator, not a destination. The “face” of the machine might just be a data layer always active, always connected, but rarely seen.
Context is everything.
Perhaps the most nuanced response, from 40% of the audience, was: it depends on the system type.
A pharmaceutical packaging line, for example, may require local HMI access for regulatory validation and traceability in compliance with FDA or EMA standards.
A water treatment plant may centralize control remotely, limiting local interfaces to basic redundancy.
A cleanroom robotic cell could operate fully autonomously, sending status updates via secure API with no screen needed.
This growing diversity of contexts is what Rockwell Automation refers to as the “hybrid HMI model,” where interaction occurs across multiple layers simultaneously, each designed for specific tasks and users.
All this means there is no one-size-fits-all interface anymore. There are many and they must coexist.
A broader user experience
At Exor International, we believe the HMI hasn’t disappeared, but it has multiplied.
- It’s local, when fast decisions and operational safety depend on immediate action, needed to be taken and managed at the edge.
- It’s remote when enterprise-level visibility and centralized control are required and must extend across the enterprise.
- It’s embedded in logic, when edge intelligence enables autonomy and eliminates the need for direct input.
This is why we design interfaces that go beyond the screen.
X Platform, our all-in-one automation ecosystem, brings together hardware, software, and IIoT connectivity into a unified architecture, designed for interaction wherever and however it happens: on-site, in the cloud, or anywhere in between.
We do not just build HMIs; we build systems that understand how interaction is changing.
Final thought: rethinking the interface
Maybe the interface is no longer on the machine. Maybe the interface is in the machine, in the data layer, in the logic, in the secure tunnels connecting plant floors to cloud services.
The machine interface today lives wherever humans and systems meet, visibly or invisibly, directly or asynchronously, via touchscreens or event streams.
The traditional HMI is no longer the whole story, but it is a chapter, one of many, in a broader and more intelligent narrative.
As interaction becomes more abstract, more layered, more contextual, the design of user experiences must follow suit, not with more screens, but with better questions.
