21-10-2024

Honeywell and Google Cloud to accelerate autonomous operations with AI agents for the industrial sector

Honeywell and Google Cloud announced a unique collaboration connecting artificial intelligence agents with assets, people and processes to accelerate safer, autonomous operations for the industrial sector.

This partnership will bring together the multimodality and natural language capabilities of Gemini on Vertex AI – Google Cloud’s AI platform – and the massive data set on Honeywell Forge, a leading Internet of Things (IoT) platform for industrials. This will unleash easy-to-understand, enterprise-wide insights across a multitude of use cases. Honeywell’s customers across the industrial sector will benefit from opportunities to reduce maintenance costs, increase operational productivity and upskill employees. The first solutions built with Google Cloud AI will be available to Honeywell’s customers in 2025.

“The path to autonomy requires assets working harder, people working smarter and processes working more efficiently,” said Vimal Kapur, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell. “By combining Google Cloud’s AI technology with our deep domain expertise--including valuable data on our Honeywell Forge platform--customers will receive unparalleled, actionable insights bridging the physical and digital worlds to accelerate autonomous operations, a key driver of Honeywell’s growth.”

“Our partnership with Honeywell represents a significant step forward in bringing the transformative power of AI to industrial operations,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “With Gemini on Vertex AI, combined with Honeywell’s industrial data and expertise, we’re creating new opportunities to optimize processes, empower workforces and drive meaningful business outcomes for industrial organizations worldwide.”

With the mass retirement of workers from the baby boomer generation, the industrial sector faces both labor and skills shortages, and AI can be part of the solution – as a revenue generator, not job eliminator. More than two-thirds (82%) of Industrial AI leaders believe their companies are early adopters of AI, but only 17% have fully launched their initial AI plans, according to Honeywell’s 2024 Industrial AI Insights report. This partnership will provide AI agents that augment the existing operations and workforce to help drive AI adoption and enable companies across the sector to benefit from expanding automation.

Honeywell and Google Cloud will co-innovate solutions around:
- Purpose-Built, Industrial AI Agents
Built on Google Cloud's Vertex AI Search and tailored to engineers’ specific needs, a new AI-powered agent will help automate tasks and reduce project design cycles, enabling users to focus on driving innovation and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Additional agents will utilize Google’s large language models (LLMs) to help technicians to more quickly resolve maintenance issues (e.g., “How did a unit perform last night?” “How do I replace the input/output module?” or “Why is my system making this sound?”). By leveraging Gemini’s multimodality capabilities, users will be able to process various data types such as images, videos, text and sensor readings, which will help its engineers get the answers they need quickly – going beyond simple chat and predictions.

- Enhanced Cybersecurity
Google Threat Intelligence – featuring frontline insight from Mandiant – will be integrated into current Honeywell cybersecurity products, including Global Analysis, Research and Defense (GARD) Threat Intelligence and Secure Media Exchange (SMX), to help enhance threat detection and protect global infrastructure for industrial customers.

- On-the-Edge Device Advances
Looking ahead, Honeywell will explore using Google’s Gemini Nano model to enhance Honeywell edge AI devices’ intelligence multiple use cases across verticals, ranging from scanning performance to voice-based guided workflow, maintenance, operational and alarm assist without the need to connect to the internet and cloud. This is the beginning of a new wave of more intelligent devices and solutions, which will be the subject of future Honeywell announcements.

By leveraging AI to enable growth and productivity, the integration of Google Cloud technology also further supports Honeywell’s alignment of its portfolio to three compelling megatrends, including automation.