Building a safer path to autonomous industrial AI

Industrial AI is entering a new phase. After decades of predictive analytics and other specialized applications, advances in foundation models, physical AI, and agentic AI are making it possible to automate more complex tasks across industrial environments. But unlike AI that operates purely in the digital world, industrial AI can interact directly with physical systems, where an unexpected decision can have consequences for safety, reliability, and critical infrastructure.

That makes responsible deployment central to the next wave of industrial automation. “How do we leverage these technologies while maintaining safety, while maintaining reliable operations, while still being able to deliver on the promises of the new capabilities?” asks Arti Garg, chief technologist at AVEVA. The challenge is particularly acute as newer AI systems become more capable but also harder to predict and explain.

One foundation for making that transition work is data. Industrial systems often contain information across telemetry, service logs, engineering documents, and other disparate sources. Newer technologies can help connect and correlate that information more quickly, giving operators real-time support when diagnosing problems. AI-powered robots could take that a step further by gathering information in hazardous environments without requiring workers to enter them.

But greater autonomy also requires new approaches to governance. AVEVA’s framework for responsible AI emphasizes security, efficiency, and human safety and oversight. Garg argues that AI should augment rather than replace people in critical decision loops, with guardrails determining where automated systems can act and where human supervisors remain responsible.

Sustainability is another part of that equation. AI can help manage complex power systems as renewable generation grows, while organizations also need better ways to understand AI’s own environmental footprint. Garg is involved in an IEEE working group developing a standard methodology for measuring that impact across electricity, energy, resources, water, and carbon.

The next phase could bring industrial AI further into the physical world, from autonomous robots and drones to AI-assisted coding that allows domain experts to build new applications. But realizing that potential will require more than deploying new technology, says Garg. Organizations will need to rethink business processes, establish appropriate safeguards, and give experienced workers new ways to apply their expertise, creating a model of automation that is not only more autonomous, but safer, more efficient, and more sustainable.

“Autonomous systems, whether they're robots or drones, are really going to change the way that we work in plants, in power systems, on mining sites,” says Garg. "In a way, that will make these types of operations more efficient, much safer for the human beings involved and more productive.”

This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with AVEVA.

Full Transcript

Megan Tatum: From MIT Technology Review, I'm Megan Tatum, and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.

My guest today is Arti Garg, chief technologist at AVEVA.

This podcast is produced in partnership with AVEVA.

Welcome, Arti.

Arti Garg: Thank you, Megan. It's great to be here.

Megan: Thank you so much for joining us. And just to start, if we could set some context for our discussion, can you share a bit about the current state of industrial AI and what AVEVA is working on at the moment as well?

Arti: Yeah, more than happy to. And I want to go back to what you already stated, which is that in some ways, industrial AI is not new. It's something that, even here at AVEVA, we've been working on for more than 20 years, really thinking about how AI can enhance applications in the industrial sector.

But what has changed quite substantially in maybe the last few years is the type of AI. We've really moved to these general purpose foundation models, which enable a lot more people to leverage advanced AI technologies. In addition to that, in just the last couple of years, there's been an explosion in what's known as physical AI and the types of AI that can really accelerate the capabilities of robotics and autonomous systems. And also agentic AI, which also allows for automation at more of the software level.

And what we're seeing is that while in the past there has been some hesitancy to adopt models that don't totally have predictable outcomes, there's been a rapid acceleration in adoption of AI even in the industrial sector. One study suggests maybe that's almost a 78% increase over the past just two years within the industrial sector. So yes, that's an inflection point, but it's almost like a step function if you think about it with respect to AI adoption.

And what we're really thinking about now at AVEVA is, how do we think about this? How do we think about incorporating these new and very powerful AI technologies in environments where customers have mission-critical operations, human safety is a significant factor? Those are some of the primary concerns that our customers have when they think about adopting any new technology. We're doing that in narrow where these newer types of AI aren't necessarily predictable, in terms of how they behave. That's one of the areas we're really thinking about is, how do we leverage these technologies while maintaining safety, while maintaining reliable operations, while still being able to deliver on the promises of the new capabilities?

Megan: There's so many things to consider at once, isn't it? And you outlined there some of the huge developments we've seen in this space in recent years. What makes this such a pivotal moment for industrial AI specifically? What has changed to make some of those perhaps more out there hypotheticals much more plausible?

Arti: Well, I think one of the big things, one of the big challenges within industrial AI, and this is something that as AVEVA, it's in our blood, it's in our core DNA, is that to really leverage any kind of digital technology in the industrial space, one of the first important things you often need to do is gather and correlate data from disparate systems, so that maybe I have telemetry coming off of a pump or a mixer, and I want to be able to correlate that with service logs so I know maybe the last time that someone had done some maintenance on that pump or mixer. And maybe I also want to be able to correlate that with the original design documentation and some of the original documentation on how to maintain that, so that if something is happening, I can do a better job diagnosing what's going wrong and how to address it. This has always been a core challenge in the industrial space.

I think that what's happening now is that with newer technologies, even things like graph databases and being able to leverage AI to really match disparate data sets much faster, we're able to get to the point where if something goes wrong, instead of an operator maybe needing to spend a little bit of time doing this research to really understand how do these different components fit together of information, they may have just an iPad with an AI that can very quickly go and fetch that information, correlate it and help in real time, almost, diagnose what is happening.

Even a little bit more out there, but not as out there as you might think is, I still describe this with a human operator with potentially a mobile tablet, but imagine now I can also have a robot moving through that environment also gathering data and either with onboard computation or a quick connection to an operator who doesn't necessarily now have to go out into a dangerous, potentially somewhat hazardous space, be able to gather data and enable that very quick diagnostic as well. And I think that's really what's exciting right now and what all of these new technologies that I've talked about are helping to enable.

And I think then from our perspective, trying to really leverage all of those means that we have to think a lot now about our governance approach to this. How do we leverage AI in a way that keeps it contained, if you will?

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. And on that governance point, how does AVEVA define responsible AI and what do you see as the primary benefits?

Arti: Yeah, so I think for us, we think about a triple mandate around responsible AI, and that means that it's secure, it's efficient, and that includes environmentally efficient, and then it really preserves human safety and human oversight above all. And for us, that's what some of our core pillars of responsible AI include. And for us, that means we think about internally as we build tools, a multi-layered governance approach where we've got both for how we use AI as a company and then how we deploy AI into our products. We've got a similar framework that we leverage across both, a kind of joint governance model, both around how we're leveraging AI and also how we're infusing AI into our products to allow our customers to leverage AI in their operations.

But I would say one of the core foundational principles underneath all of these is that human beings still remain centered in how we think about how AI is leveraged. And so human judgment, human responsibility, human ethics are still core to how we think about where AI can add benefits, and we think about it more as augmenting rather than replacing human beings in critical decision loops, if you will.

Megan: Right, which is such an important distinction, isn't it? And in terms of the next phase of development, there's growing sentiment that agentic AI will soon allow these industrial systems to operate much more autonomously. I wonder, what makes the risks in industrial settings different from AI risk in a purely digital context? And I suppose on the flip side, what are the benefits and opportunities of that same software defined automation?

Arti: I think we can start with the risks and then go to the benefits. I think ultimately, I would say the biggest risk in the industrial setting is that we are interacting with real physical systems, often physical systems that are very capable of delivering important outcomes that keep our world running, whether that's delivering power, whether that's mining for natural resources. But usually. Those physical systems are also operating in hazardous environments, the equipment itself is capable of also having human safety implications. Anytime you're interfacing software with a physical system that can have real world consequences, you have to be extra careful. And we've always had that, again, we've had that in our DNA at AVEVA from the beginning, being mindful of that end user and that end application, which is not just something on a computer screen.

Even as we've deployed AI over the past few decades into our systems, we've typically leaned toward really trying to pick the best fit model, really understand that model's behavior if we're going to use, for example, we have a proprietary anomaly detection model that works in a lot of operational environments. Now, as we're thinking about some of these newer AI capabilities, which by design are hard to understand how they behave, they're not fundamentally explainable in the way we've thought about even AI or statistical models in the past, and actually their behavior can change over time as they learn and get tuned to new capabilities. That's really the potential risk of automating a physical system based on capabilities that can evolve over time is one of the things that we have to be really mindful of and really thoughtful around, where are we willing to put some of that increased automation into practice?

But at the same time, I think there's a real opportunity there, because I glossed over this idea that, okay, well, models evolve, but so do human beings, and sometimes that's a good thing. We talk about humans having expertise and they gain understanding over their careers of how a system works. If we can actually leverage the ability of some of these newer AI capabilities, these sort of reasoning models often have underlying agentic capabilities, to learn and gather experience faster, and potentially even more importantly or more valuably, take experience that's learned at one site and apply it to another site, then that's a real opportunity to take what we already know works for human beings, which is that sometimes you just have to learn by doing and be able to apply that and scale that through AI. That's where I see potentially a real opportunity in this space.

One of the things that we're really aware of in the industrial sector is just the way that our workforce is changing. I think that almost half, not quite half, of the industrial workforce is set to retire in the next five years, and that's a lot of expertise and experience that means that we're going to lose in the sector. If there's ways to make sure that we can capture that in ways that are actionable, in ways that can also help a newer generation of workers that are used to experience things in a different way, apply that expertise, apply that knowledge, then I think that's a huge opportunity within the industrial space.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. Clearly, some huge opportunities there particularly against the backdrop of other market and workforce changes as you've outlined there. I suppose building on that, what is the potential for these autonomous industrial AI systems when built and deployed responsibly to facilitate even faster, more sustainable industrial processes?

Arti: I think there's a couple different ways to think about this. One is, what are the demands of potentially more environmentally sustainable processes? I'll use one example of something that my team has been working on in partnership with Idaho National Laboratory here in the U.S. as part of their testing for AI grid resilience project.

One of the challenges in the electric grid as we're moving toward a future where we have a lot more intermittent renewable power generation sources, often distributed rooftop solar for example, is it's becoming much more challenging to manage the grid both from really understanding where electric capacity is coming in, electric load is pulling off of the grid. In addition to that, being able to maintain just power quality because instead of having one spinning asset delivering the frequency of electricity that's going across the grid, you've got a lot of smaller systems. AI is actually quite critical for being able to manage that grid of the future. And this is one of the things that we've been working in partnership is, how can we do that? How can we help grid operators better understand what's happening across their system, identify where things might be behaving anomalously so they can detect that early and then remediate for it?

At the same time though, I always talk about that's an example of where AI can potentially help us accelerate the transition to a lower carbon energy future. At the same time, I think there's a lot of conversation around the sustainability of AI itself. What are the power requirements? What are the resource requirements needed to run AI? And before I get into how do we think about that at AVEVA, because it is definitely something we think about and I think a lot of actors in the space are thinking about, I want to point out, is one of the challenges is that there's really no agreed upon method to measure the environmental impact of AI. You see a lot of these stories, like one query on some kind of chat interface is X amount of gallons of water or this amount of electricity use. But the truth is that community-wide, there's no agreed upon standard.

One of the things that I'm involved with is a standards working group that was launched by the IEEE two years ago, a little over two years ago. I'm the chair of that working group, it's called the P7100 Standards Working Group on measuring the environmental impact of AI. And one of the things we're trying to do is really identify all the different areas over which we want to think about environmental sustainability associated with AI, and then having one standard methodology that works and that can be adopted both from a reporting perspective and potentially also from an oversight or regulatory perspective. That becomes really important for any sort of real understanding of how AI impacts the environment is just we have to know, what does it use? We want to look holistically at that. Our standards cover electricity and energy consumption, it covers resource usage, it covers water consumption, and it also covers carbon.

But all of that said, I think it's important for us to understand the footprint of AI, but I think it's also important for us to simultaneously recognize that a bigger model uses more compute and more compute probably leverages more resources. The more that we can be intentional and pick the right size model for the right application, the more we can already start down that path of being more environmentally efficient in the AI that we run. One of the potentially nice side effects of that is the more purpose-built a model, the less likely it is to misbehave in unpredictable ways, if you choose correctly your architecture. There's some sort of ancillary benefits that go beyond environmental sustainability.

Megan: Fascinating. It's really, really interesting to hear some of the work going on behind the scenes there, because I think we'll all have heard some of the statistics around the environmental impact, as you say. So, it's great to understand some of the work going on there to really clarify that.

And we've talked a little bit about AI augmenting humans earlier. As systems gain greater autonomy, how should organizations think about that balance between closed loop automation, human in the loop accountability? What guardrails need to be in place? And how are governments and cross-border actors approaching those concerns as well?

Arti: There's a lot packed into that question, so I'll try to answer it somewhat one by one. First, starting with that sort of balance between closed loop and human in the loop, automation and accountability. One of the things that we talk about in the industrial sector is from human operator to human supervisor of systems, of industrial systems. And if I'm honest about that, we're still trying to figure that out. When a human's in a loop in an automated system, you're really thinking about a system may process all the data and then make a recommendation.

We've got a solution that we've been working on more jointly with a few different customers where we're able to take in a lot of their operational data, also some simulations of how their systems work, and be able to provide, say, recommendations around, you should now operate at this set point instead of that set point based on some of the other conditions that are changing in your plant. There's a lot of interest in moving from having that be a recommended set point to have an automation that can automatically adjust the set point. And we've actually had some successful real-world pilots around that as well.

But when you get into that, obviously it makes people very nervous if you're changing set points on industrial equipment. That's where you maybe continue to have some guardrails around like, you can't go outside of a certain band, for example, of operations, or we only allow the automation in certain areas. That's where the human supervisor, the same way a human supervisor might give employees a lot of bandwidth or a lot of flexibility to make decisions around certain things, around other things, they're hard and fast, like this is the deadline or this is the sort of production target. It's like that. So thinking about, how do you put the appropriate guardrails?

The challenge is, AIs are not human beings, and so the guardrails look different, and I think that's one of the things that there's still to think about. That question of, what guardrails should be put in place? I think that it's going to be probably dependent a little bit on the application, but over time I think we're all going to learn, and so being really upfront and thoughtful about how we do this I think is important.

But the opportunity though, potentially, is really great. I've already mentioned that AI can be very useful in synthesizing a lot of information and bringing to the forefront, this is what matters. That's something that we do want to create some space to experiment around, but what's then important is making sure that a human being understands the risk.

I'll give a little bit of a personal story because it might be illustrative. This weekend, I bought a little toy robot and decided I wanted to program it to do some stuff, and I found AI very, very helpful to get me started to read all the documentation. Putting the robot together was straightforward, they had nice instructions, but there's a pretty heavy software developer kit that's already there, but going through and reading all that documentation can take a while. AI was super helpful to help me surface, this is the function that does this, to help me get started. But occasionally, it made really bad recommendations on the best way to troubleshoot something.

That's where I think having the human being in the loop, being able to say, "I know that it's not going to be the best software architect or the best troubleshooter," is really helpful because I had the opportunity to leverage AI for what it's good for, synthesizing and surfacing a lot of information, but being able to say, "I don't think that's the most efficient first step. Let's try something else." That's where it's a really different way of working, but it's something that I think as humans get more comfortable with the power and limitations of AI, you can start to teach people how to work with it, and it's very different from how you would work with other digital tools.

One of the things that is important when it comes to AI is recognizing just the breadth of things that it touches and the breadth of impacts that it's going to have, whether it's on the environment, as we've discussed, whether it's on productivity as sort of implicit in this entire discussion, whether it's on labor force, whether it's on just how economies work. From my eye, and I'm by no means a policy expert in this area, but from my eye, what I'm seeing is that different governments are prioritizing different aspects of that from how they're thinking about regulatory and other kind of governance approaches.

Megan: We're absolutely seeing some really vastly different approaches to this, aren't we, around the world? I wondered to illustrate some of this, if you could share perhaps some case studies you've seen, maybe talking us through what lessons they could hold for other organizations perhaps a little earlier in their own AI journeys.

Arti: I think a lot of the key areas where we're seeing very clear benefits of adopting AI in the industrial sector, the core to all of them is actually getting the data right and getting the right foundation of data so that you can build AI on top of it.

One of our customers, SCG Chemicals, which is a petrochemical company in Thailand, they had this vision of producing a reliability platform for their operations that was as AI-driven as possible. But a core part of that was actually getting the data right, being able to have all of their information in the right place, leveraging some of AVEVA's tools to do that. Bringing together operational data and also engineering data. And then putting on top of that AI capabilities, in this case, one of our capabilities called AVEVA Predictive Analytics that deploys some proprietary models to do things like detect anomalies, so that they could really much earlier identify potential operational risks. And instead of having unplanned downtime, translate that to planned downtime. When you translate unplanned downtime to planned downtime, you can get a huge improvement in plant reliability.

At this point they're targeting something like 99% plant reliability and a very, very high return on investment from the platform that they put in place. Again, in early pilot days, it was almost a 9x ROI, and so that's really quite impressive. But what I want to emphasize is that it's kind of a multi-layered problem to get it right.

Megan: Those are some really striking results, though. I mean, for industrial leaders who perhaps are still hesitant to explore AI, I wonder, what do you think is the cost of taking a more wait and see approach?

Arti: I think, again, this is an area where the industrial sector has a little bit of a different calculus to apply to this type of problem. In general, I think you would hear most business experts say that you can't afford to take a wait and see approach to AI because it is so transformative across every sector of society and economy, and certainly in the industrial space, we're not immune to that. But I do think that some of the challenges that I've outlined today also puts leaders in the industrial space into a mindset of sometimes potentially being a fast follower rather than the first adopter of newer technologies, just because the risk is so high.

But that being said, I think one of the challenges is that the risks that we've covered today around infusing systems that don't always behave predictably with physical systems is that I don't know that there's a lot of other sectors that are going to be solving those problems. That's where what I'm seeing is actually a lot of interest and excitement in trying new things and willingness to do that because there's a recognition that applied correctly and applied with the right guardrails and safeguards in place, these technologies really have truly transformative potential from a resource usage standpoint, from a human safety standpoint, from a productivity standpoint.

I think the calculus has shifted a little bit in the sector to we want to actually try these things out. But then it becomes more, how do we try these things out in environments that we can make a little bit more sandboxed or safe to test out what some of the unique challenges we're going to face in the industrial sector are?

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. It's just hard to ignore the potential nowadays, isn't it? And just to close with a slightly future forward look, I suppose, what are you most enthusiastic about in terms of the long-term potential of responsible autonomous industrial AI systems?

I think then looking beyond that, I was a little bit of a, not to say a robotic skeptic, because clearly robotics and autonomous systems are going to be important, especially given the types of environments, whether they're hazardous or remote, that industrial equipment operates in. But I just actually think things are moving a lot faster than I had anticipated. I'm really interested to see how these physical embodiments of AI systems start to really transform, again, how we think about operations.

One of the things about any new technology in any environment is that to really gain value from it, you have to change the way you do things. I would say for close to 10 years now, I've been giving talks on AI adoption and I always say the biggest barrier to AI adoption is not anything to do with the technology. It's not even to do with the data, although data are often the biggest sticking point, it's really to do with, are you going to change your business processes to be able to work with the way this technology is good or not good at things?

Autonomous systems, whether they're robots or drones, are really going to change the way that we work in plants, in power systems, on mining sites. And I think that will make these types of operations more efficient, much safer for the human beings involved and more productive. So, I'm quite excited about that.

I don't know entirely what direction it will go, but one of the things that I think about a lot is that if you go back to I, Robot and Isaac Asimov's book, the premise of those was that robotics would be the first broadly adopted AI, not computer-based systems. We went in the other direction and I think it's really interesting to now see all of this converging.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. See robotics catches up a bit. So many exciting things on the horizon, that's for sure. Thank you so much, for your time.

That was Arti Garg, chief technologist at AVEVA, whom I spoke with from Brighton in England.

That's it for this episode of Business Lab. I'm your host, Megan Tatum. I'm a contributing editor at Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you can find us in print, on the web, and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com.

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