AI, Data Sharing and the Return of MES: Aveva Leaders Discuss Industry's Digital Future
Why this article is worth your time:
- Aveva's leadership team shares candid perspectives on how AI is transforming industrial operations while addressing workforce concerns and implementation challenges.
- Learn why companies with historically tight data protection policies are now being urged to share information — even with competitors — and how this "radical collaboration" creates unexpected value.
- Discover why MES tech is moving from background middleware to the critical centerpiece of digital transformation strategies across multiple industries.
At the Aveva World 2025 event, Automation World had the opportunity to connect directly with: Caspar Herzberg, CEO; Kim Custeau, executive vice president of portfolio management; and Rob McGreevy, chief product officer. In these discussions, we were offered insights on the industry trends they see influencing the development and use of their software technologies as well as the direction of the manufacturing and processing industries they serve.
Not surprisingly, much of our discussions focused on artificial intelligence and how it is changing both industrial technologies and operations. But we also explored the resurgence in interest around manufacturing execution systems (MES) and digital twin applications.
The growth in development and use of these technologies underscore Herzberg’s point during his keynote at the event where he said: “We’re all told we’re in an era where industry must do more with less. But we live in a time of plenty. There are more data, more connections, more technologies and more rapid innovation than ever. So, this is not a time to do more with less. The evolution of today’s business ecosystems enables companies to embrace industry integration and fragmentation, but to do so effectively requires the right underlying technology — industrial intelligence.”
Data sharing: Making a once unthinkable activity normal
In his keynote, Herzberg also stressed the need for industrial companies to share data widely, even potentially with competitors. Given the manufacturing industry’s hesitance to share data — many remained cautious about sending their data to the cloud just a few years ago — I asked Herzberg what he thought would compel manufacturers to do this.
“The lower your margins, the more value you’ll look to extract,” he said, adding that he believes industry’s general low margins (outside of the oil and gas industry) will lead greater data sharing within supply chains to “become the norm quickly.”
Herzberg pointed to the positive feedback Aveva has received around the concept of greater data sharing that furthers support for Aveva’s own open system approach. “That’s why we make it easy to integrate with Aveva Connect — even when it overlaps with [partners like] Seeq. We do this because it creates value for the customer and, ultimately, we all win. You win more when you collaborate.”
The concept of working across connected ecosystems represents “a big change for industry," he said. "Radical collaboration that transcends business as usual to connect information in new ways by sharing data across domains helps to find the signal in the noise. That’s why we believe sharing information doesn’t detract from its value, it enhances it.”
He stressed how this can apply to working with rivals: “Here, one plus one can equal three; because the big issues facing industry can’t be dealt with by only looking inward.”
The question is of course: Is industry ready for such “radical collaboration”?
Herzberg contends that both industry and its technology suppliers “don’t really have a choice. The world needs industry to birth the digital economy of the future while keeping the planet livable for future generations.”
AI and its potential impacts on industry’s workforce
At Hanover Messe 2025, Aveva previewed its Industrial AI tech. Details about this new technology and how it can be applied in industry can be seen in this Automation World article explaining Aveva’s application of agentic AI.
Given many workers’ concerns about AI use in industry, Automation World asked Kim Custeau if Aveva had any particular message to manufacturers about how they see AI impacting industry.
“The main message is to make sure that people understand this technology is being developed to augment the human, not to enable an entirely autonomous plant,” she said. “An experienced operator or engineer understands their processes, understands what's critical and understands the risks. Here, the AI assistant can help these experienced workers get access to information to make an informed decision more quickly.”
And for new workers in industry, Custeau noted that, while they often have a good background in technology, they likely don’t know much about industry. For them, AI provides quick access to information and guidance.
Herzberg added that the common fear about AI dramatically reducing the need for people in industry isn’t accurate. But this doesn’t mean workforce changes won’t occur with greater adoption of AI. “The manager that uses AI will stay around,” he said. “Plus, there still aren’t enough engineers available that are needed. Here, AI supports the training of new workers. With AI, you can get people up to speed quickly, often within 6 months.
Rob McGreevy noted that corporate pressures around profitability and sustainability are also driving industry’s interest in AI around “production optimizations that can reduce costs more than we've ever seen before.”
He said that, when reviewing meetings Aveva has had with its customers, eight out of 10 of those meetings were focused on AI. “They want to know what we are doing with this technology, what we’re seeing, how we are handling responsible use of AI and what use cases with AI are delivering the most value,” McGreevy said.
What makes this shift interesting for McGreevy is that industry has a fairly long history with AI already. “With predictive and prescriptive analytics, for example, AI has been a staple tech in large capital projects related to turbines, power generation, and oil and gas production for years. What we're seeing now is AI also being adopted by some of the fast-moving consumer goods and hybrid industries.”
What end users are asking about AI
When asked about the feedback from customers who have been testing Aveva’s new Industrial AI tech, Custeau noted two key points: how to prompt the software most effectively and data governance.
“The way you ask questions to an AI agent is important,” Custeau said, and feedback from customers on this “helped us think about the best way for users to ask the questions they want AI help with. This is essentially a new role for users: becoming a prompt engineer.”
Related to data governance, Custeau noted that Aveva has heard from many customers with SharePoint drives full of production content they want to incorporate into their AI systems. Learning more about all the data these companies have in the SharePoint drives highlighted for Aveva more areas where manufacturers need data governance insights to get these data included in their AI-powered applications.
She explained that a key aspect of this process involves managing the naming of assets — which are often named differently in different systems as well as in different areas of a system, leading the software to think these are two distinct assets when they’re the same.
“That’s why data governance is going to be an important part of this whole AI journey,” Custeau said. “Because once you apply any AI tool to data that is not in the best condition it can be, you're not going to get the best answer.”
Changing priorities around visualization
McGreevy pointed out how, amid all the new AI technologies now available to industry, one of the biggest shifts he’s seeing involves a greater focus on the visibility of a manufacturer’s value chain and supply chain.
The concept around Aveva’s Unified Operations Center and its visualization capabilities grew up in the power and oil and gas industries, but McGreevy is now seeing this concept become for more pervasive across industry.
“I was talking with one of our customers in the consumer-packaged goods industry who is planning to deploy this in their pet food divisions,” he said. “The whole concept for Unified Operations Center is for it to be a command-and-control center that can drill down into issues and highlight everything from corporate ERP reports to providing a true representation of how a facility is running. The oil and gas industry has been using this technology to optimize the entirety of their value chain.”
McGreevy explained that the increased interest in this visualization technology stems from how manufacturers tend to think of their production facilities. When they do this, McGreevy says they typically see “a bunch of production lines and their equipment. But when they take a step back — whether it’s from that one facility or from a fleet of plants — they want to see that whole end-to-end picture, with one version of the truth on one pane of glass.”
He added that, for many manufacturers, “visualization becomes the first step that forces you to get your data in order to get you in a good position to take advantage of AI,” he added.
Why MES remains central to manufacturing
For years, MES was largely referred to as middleware used to connect data from plant floor systems to corporate ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems. More recently, however, MES is being positioned as a central connector for industry’s digital transformation.
McGreevy believes MES has become more prominent with industry’s digital transformation because of “the amount of innovation occurring in industry, particularly in the food, pharmaceuticals and durable goods industries. You can see this in the number of stock keeping units (SKUs) these companies are producing, their reformulation of products and their packaging. All of this requires manufacturing systems that are fast to implement and agile — and that is absolutely helping to drive MES into the foreground. More manufacturers are realizing that, if you want to optimize your supply chain or your value chain, the factory is literally the center of that. And for the factory to make stuff efficiently, MES needs to be there.”
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