In Short:
Honeywell and Google Cloud have teamed up to improve industrial automation by combining AI with Honeywell’s IoT platform. They plan to launch AI-powered solutions in 2025, tackling maintenance challenges and boosting productivity, especially as many workers retire. This partnership will utilize Google’s AI capabilities to provide real-time insights and automate tasks, benefiting various industries and addressing workforce shortages.
Honeywell and Google Cloud Collaboration
Honeywell and Google Cloud have formalized a partnership focused on enhancing industrial automation by integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Honeywell’s Internet of Things (IoT) platform. This collaboration aims to merge Google Cloud’s advanced AI capabilities, including the Gemini AI agent on Vertex AI, with the Honeywell Forge IoT platform. The goal is to deliver real-time insights and streamline automation across multiple industries.
Transforming Industrial Operations with AI-Powered Agents
The official announcement indicates that this partnership seeks to enhance maintenance processes, improve productivity, and tackle labor shortages exacerbated by the aging workforce, notably the retirement of the baby boomer generation. The joint effort will focus on developing AI-powered agents to automate tasks, shorten design cycles, and support engineers through real-time data analysis.
“This partnership will bring together the multimodality and natural language capabilities of Gemini on Vertex AI—Google Cloud’s AI platform—and the extensive data set from Honeywell Forge. This integration will unlock clear and comprehensible insights across various applications. Customers in the industrial sector will experience significant benefits, such as reduced maintenance costs, enhanced operational productivity, and opportunities for employee upskilling,” the release stated.
“Achieving autonomy necessitates that assets operate more efficiently, personnel work smarter, and processes optimize functionality,” asserted Vimal Kapur, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell. “By synthesizing Google Cloud’s AI technology with our in-depth domain expertise and rich data from the Honeywell Forge platform, we are poised to offer customers unprecedented insights that bridge the physical and digital realms, thereby accelerating autonomous operations—a critical factor in Honeywell’s growth strategy.”
“Our partnership with Honeywell signifies a major advancement in harnessing the transformative capabilities of AI for industrial operations,” remarked Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “The combination of Gemini on Vertex AI with Honeywell’s industrial data and expertise creates new avenues for process optimization, workforce empowerment, and impactful business outcomes for industrial organizations globally.”
Upcoming Solutions to Launch in 2025
The inaugural solutions developed through the integration of Google Cloud AI are anticipated to be rolled out to Honeywell’s customers in 2025. These solutions are designed to enhance processes and further develop workforce capabilities, enabling companies within the industrial sector to progress toward safer and increasingly autonomous operations.
Insights from the Industrial AI Insights Report
In announcing their partnership, Honeywell highlighted that the industrial sector is grappling with labor and skills shortages due to the mass retirement of the baby boomer generation, emphasizing that AI could serve as a viable solution—functioning as a revenue generator rather than a job eliminator.
Per Honeywell’s 2024 Industrial AI Insights report, over two-thirds (82 percent) of leaders in the Industrial AI sector consider their companies to be early adopters of AI technologies; however, merely 17 percent have fully launched their initial AI initiatives.
Honeywell and Google Cloud will co-innovate solutions in the following areas:
AI-Powered Agents for Industrial Workflows
The alliance will utilize Google Cloud’s Vertex AI to develop custom AI agents specifically aimed at automating engineering tasks and expediting project timelines. By leveraging large language models (LLMs) from Google, these AI systems are expected to assist technicians in swiftly addressing issues by analyzing diverse data types, including images, videos, and sensor readings for complex troubleshooting scenarios.
Examples of queries the AI will handle include: “How did a unit perform last night?” “How do I replace the input/output module?” and “What is causing this sound in my system?”
Cybersecurity and Edge Device Innovation
The cybersecurity offerings from Honeywell, including GARD Threat Intelligence and Secure Media Exchange (SMX), will benefit from enhanced threat detection capabilities through Google Cloud’s Mandiant threat intelligence, aimed at safeguarding global infrastructure for industrial clients.
Looking to the future, Honeywell intends to explore the potential of Google’s Gemini Nano to improve intelligence in edge devices, thereby facilitating offline operations for tasks such as maintenance and alarms.
“This marks the beginning of a new phase characterized by smarter devices and solutions, which will be elaborated upon in future announcements from Honeywell,” the company concluded.
