100 INTERVIEW Why the AI era demands radical collaboration As the world becomes more fragmented and industrial risk intensifies, organisations must respond by collaborating more deeply, securely and purposefully than ever before, advises AVEVA’s Zubin Davar 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 crossstakeholder 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. BY REBECCA GIBSON “ Trusted data platforms and AI are our paths to more resilient, collaborative and intelligent industrial ecosystems”
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