6 surprising things about digital twins

PEX Network’s key takeaways:

• Digital twins are revolutionizing how organizations design, operate, and improve complex systems.
• There are many surprising things about digital twin technology.
• Digital twins are used in many industries, can solve sustainability challenges, aren’t only for machines, and were first pioneerd by NASA.

Digital twins are dynamic virtual replicas of a physical object, process, system, or environment. While digital twins are becoming increasingly popular, implemented, and understood, there are still many surprising things about digital twin technology.

Digital twins are revolutionizing how organizations design, operate, and improve complex systems. Originally developed for aerospace engineering, the concept has evolved into a cornerstone of modern industry, powering everything from smart factories and energy grids to urban planning and personalized healthcare.

By combining real-time data with simulation, artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics, digital twins make it possible to test scenarios safely, optimize performance, reduce costs, and uncover insights that were previously inaccessible.

As digital systems become more connected and intelligent, digital twins are emerging not just as tools for monitoring but as platforms for decision-making, experimentation, and innovation – bridging the physical and digital worlds in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago.

Join the PEX Network community

Don't miss any news, updates or insider tips from PEX Network by getting them delivered to your inbox. Sign up to our newsletter and join our community of experts. 

Learn More

Here are 6 surprising things about digital twins!

1. Digital twins are used in many industries

Digital twins are now being implemented across many different sectors including manufacturing, healthcare, retail, law enforcement, and defense. This reflects the wide-ranging benefits digital twins can offer modern organizations as they drive innovation, efficiency, and optimization.

• Over 40 percent of manufacturing firms are piloting digital twin technology with full rollouts continuing to emerge, according to the Manufacturing IT/OT Trend Report 2025.
• Police officers in Lincolnshire became the first in the UK to use artificial intelligence (AI) powered digital twins to predict, prevent, and treat work-related injuries.
• Fashion retailer H&M debuted its first set of AI-generated digital twins of models.
• Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) went live with a digital twin of six hospitals as part of its strategy to create a smart estate and support digital transformation.
• Digital twins play a critical role in the digital transformation of the aerospace-defense sector, according to a report from the Digital Twin Consortium (DTC).

2. Digital twins don’t always mirror a single object

Many industrial twins replicate systems of systems – for example, an entire factory, a supply chain, or even a city. These twins simulate interactions across thousands of components, not just one machine.

BMW Group is transforming global manufacturing operations with advanced digital twin technology. The world’s leading manufacturer of premium cars and motorcycles is scaling its Virtual Factory, with production planners continuously expanding applications in the digital twins of over 30 production sites to accelerate production planning worldwide.

“The fundamental technologies that enable the industrial metaverse are being rapidly developed worldwide,” comments Peter Koerte, CTO and chief strategy officer at Siemens AG. “Many companies are not only experimenting with these technologies but are already employing and scaling concrete use cases that demonstrate the added value of the industrial metaverse.”

3. Digital twins can solve sustainability challenges

An international competition brought together university students from the US, Germany, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Brazil to apply digital twin technology to solve real-world sustainability challenges. 

The 2025 iTwin4Good Challenge was organized by infrastructure engineering software company Bentley Systems and Enactus and challenged teams to use digital twins to address critical sustainability issues.

From tackling waste and renewable energy to reimagining resource use, the projects demonstrated how the next generation of leaders is combining entrepreneurial thinking with cutting-edge technology to drive meaningful global impact.

“These projects highlight the ingenuity and passion of young leaders who are proving that business innovation can be a powerful force for good,” says George Tsiatis, president and CEO at Enactus Global and Resolution Project. By tackling global issues like waste, energy, and sustainability with cutting-edge technologies, these students are showing what it means to create lasting impact.”

Watch: Driving technology adoption through acceptance models, human-centered design and change management!

4. Digital twins can forecast behavior and evolve continuously

With advanced physics models or machine learning, digital twins can simulate how an asset will behave in the future, predicting failures, optimizing energy use, or simulating what-if scenarios under conditions that haven’t happened yet.

Digital twins are widely used for designing unbuilt products, testing performance before materials are ordered. Automakers, for example, build and crash-test virtual vehicles long before they create physical prototypes.

What’s more, some digital twins use real-time telemetry and AI to self-update their own logic. Over time, the twin may change how it models wear, efficiency, or performance as it learns from the physical asset.

5. Digital twins aren’t only for machines

Digital twins aren’t only for machines; they can be used for people. Human digital twins model things like athletes’ biomechanics, patient-specific organ models for simulation, ergonomic workplace design, and even behaviors in large crowd simulations.

The H&M instance cited above is a prime example. In March, H&M announced plans to use 30 AI-created models in some social media posts and marketing in the place of humans, if given permission to do so by their human counterparts.

H&M is “curious to explore how to showcase” its fashion in new creative ways while embracing the benefits of new technology and staying true to its commitment to personal style, according to chief creative officer Jörgen Andersson.

6. Digital twins require more data engineering than AI

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of digital twins isn’t the modeling; it’s integrating messy sensor data, synchronizing systems, maintaining mappings between real-world identifiers and virtual counterparts, and managing versioning across lifecycles.

Beyond ingestion, teams must maintain stable mappings between physical assets and their digital representations, even as equipment is replaced, reconfigured, or upgraded. They need robust data lineage and versioning to track changes across the lifecycle of both the asset and the twin. Synchronization becomes an ongoing obstacle.

In many cases, the sophistication of the pipelines, schemas, and governance required for a reliable digital twin far exceeds the complexity of the AI or modeling layers themselves. 

Some more surprising things about digital twins

• The global digital twin market is projected to reach US$155.84 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 34.2 percent, according to Grand View Research.
• NASA pioneered the foundational concept of a digital twin. It originated during the Apollo program, where engineers built precise digital replicas of spacecraft so they could diagnose problems from Earth when something failed in space.
• Change management is essential for adoption. Employees must be trained to work alongside digital twins and organizations should foster a culture of innovation to maximize benefits.
• Nations like Singapore and the UK have created large-scale digital twins that simulate traffic flow, infrastructure stress, energy use, and even flood scenarios.

All Access: Future of BPM 2026

You asked, and we listened. Business process management (BPM) remains the cornerstone technology for driving organizational transformation, according to the survey results featured in the latest PEX Report. As we look toward 2026 and beyond, generative AI, agentic AI, and intelligent process orchestration are redefining how processes are designed, executed, and optimized. BPM is your key to adapting swiftly and effectively in this new era.

PEX Network is bringing together industry leaders, technology innovators, and thought leaders to answer your biggest questions and explore the advancements reshaping business today. And you're invited. Register for free to save your spot now! 

Register Now