By Rebecca Gibson |
The world is becoming increasingly divided, polarised and deglobalised. At the same time, AI is lowering barriers to cyberattacks, industrial disruption and geopolitical risk. According to Zubin Davar, global vice president of AVEVA’s CONNECT Platform, this has created a paradox for the industrial AI sector: as these threats become more complex and borderless, the industry needs greater connectivity and collaboration to address them. To navigate this challenge, Davar argues that industrial organisations must build secure connected platforms and ecosystems that enable trusted collaboration, responsible governance and operational resilience.
Why is trust becoming a defining challenge in industrial AI?
In an industrial environment, AI will impact power generation, energy reliability, water systems, transportation, food supply chains, and more. To extract real value from industrial AI, the sector will require a broad circle of trust involving operators, technology providers, regulators, cloud providers, safety teams and sometimes public institutions. It is about creating safe, reliable and intelligent operating environments where there can be very real physical consequences.
The market talks a lot about models, copilots, agents and automation. But in the industrial world, the model itself is only as useful as the operational context that informs the data feeding it. AI cannot reliably reason across that level of complexity unless the data is unified, contextualised, governed and trusted. Ultimately, context is largely the difference between a directional prediction and a decision you can actually trust.
Can you explain how AVEVA’s industrial intelligence platform helps organisations build trusted industrial AI?
The CONNECT platform enables secure data sharing across operational technology (OT) and IT domains, both within an enterprise and throughout the ecosystems of cross-stakeholder entities.
Many industrial technologies were designed to optimise a single site, process or function. AI is now forcing a break from that model. The opportunity is much larger. Today we must gain insights across plants, fleets, supply chains, engineering teams, IT teams and entire ecosystems of partners. CONNECT creates a single source of industrial truth upon a customer-specific semantic model, turning siloed systems into collaborative intelligence networks.
How are industrial AI ecosystems evolving, and how are AVEVA and Microsoft working together to shape that future?
Closed ecosystems will not win the future of industrial AI; they will eventually hit natural limits. Instead, the real opportunity lies in creating interoperable ecosystems that allow customers to combine the best capabilities of multiple partners.
Our rich, long-standing partnership with Microsoft reflects that shift. Together, we combine industrial context with cloud-scale robustness, OT expertise with IT innovation, and shared views around AI outcomes.
Microsoft understands ecosystem thinking very well. It is deeply embedded in the company’s DNA – platforms like Azure, Fabric, Power BI and Databricks on Azure all coexist with partner applications and enterprise AI. It no longer just provides cloud infrastructure, but ecosystem infrastructure too.
What steps can the industry take to optimise AI governance?
Industrial organisations already have decades of experience operating within strict safety and governance frameworks. They understand safe operating envelopes, operational controls and risk management extremely well. No one should introduce non-deterministic AI systems in critical asset environments without embedding them within those existing governance structures. I refer to this as ‘bounded autonomy’.
We should shape AI around the governance systems that industrial organisations already trust and understand. Platforms such as CONNECT create a foundation for flexible and robust industrial governance by making data usable and auditable across enterprises and ecosystems.
What should industrial leaders prioritise when building AI strategies?
In an era defined by fragmentation, the most powerful technology strategy is collaboration.
A big part of why I love working on CONNECT is that it has more than just technical value. In a moment when the world often feels increasingly unstable, I believe technology can help the industrial world come together even more effectively.
Personally, I have always believed that progress depends on our ability to build meaningful connection – between people, institutions, systems and ideas. What energises me is that we’ve arrived at a moment where that feels less like an aspiration and more like an operational requirement to unlock AI’s full value. CONNECT helps us get there. That’s why I am optimistic. Trusted data platforms and AI are our paths to more resilient, collaborative and intelligent industrial ecosystems. That can be our future, if we build it the right way.
Learn how AVEVA can help you connect your industrial ecosystem at: bit.ly/4enUR16
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