Good morning. Leveraging data and AI in the industrial sector is set to be a game-changer.
That was a key topic at Honeywell’s Future of Energy Summit in Washington, D.C., that I attended last week. Suresh Venkatarayalu, SVP and chief technology officer at Honeywell explained that the labor shortages in the industrial sector will be massive as skilled workers retire in the coming years. At the same time, there will soon be a high demand for manufacturing jobs to be filled in the United States, he said.
Venkatarayalu pointed to the findings from Honeywell’s latest survey of 300 U.S. decision-makers in energy and energy-adjacent industries. Eighty-five percent are already actively using or piloting AI in their companies. The top three areas where respondents think AI will prove most valuable are cybersecurity and threat detection, predictive maintenance, and operational efficiency. “It actually really fits the bill in terms of how the industry is pivoting,” he said.
Regarding AI, “2024 to 2025 was a period of piloting,” Venkatarayalu said. “I strongly believe between 2025 and 2026 is the period when we’ll be starting to see massive, big initiatives transforming the industry.” Honeywell (No. 114 on the Fortune 500) operates in automation, aviation, and energy, all supported by advanced digital technologies.
I think of Exxon Mobil as an example of a major energy company that is investing in AI and automation. During the Q1 earnings call on Friday, SVP and CFO Kathy Mikells said the company is “trying to use technology to basically drive our efficiency, reduce our overhead costs by doing things in a more automated fashion; it’s still an area where we have a significant opportunity.” For example, Exxon Mobil recently implemented an accounting software platform, she said. “It’s literally enabled us to save tens of thousands of hours of what was very manually intensive work because we can now automate it.”
Honeywell’s survey also found that more than half of respondents (53%) are using AI to address labor shortages and are conducting workforce upskilling through virtual assistants. Energy companies, in particular, will need to be equipped with the right human talent and AI technology to meet the power demand for AI data centers.
At Honeywell, Venkatarayalu and his team have taken data from the last three to four decades from its installed base—which includes the company’s domain knowledge, along with data and insights from its systems—and used it to train a foundational model that is now starting to guide a new generation of workers, he explained.
CFOs are increasingly concerned about their ability to leverage AI effectively due to a shortage of skilled professionals, making upskilling current team members essential.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
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