In 2025, AI is Industry’s New Business Partner

By adopting AI systems designed with ethical considerations and human-centric features, industries are making strategic shifts that align with evolving technology and sustainability priorities, says Jim Chappell, Global Head of AI at AVEVA
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a regular feature of life over the past couple of years. Its applications extend from suggesting automated email responses and helping us create better resumes to optimizing industrial asset performance, supporting smarter decisions and even predicting future scenarios through technologies such as neural networks, deep learning, and reinforcement learning.
We’ll see an expansion of those use cases in 2025, with AI driving strategic shifts in how the industry operates. Expect AI to become a direct partner in your organization’s growth, making complex processes simpler and helping people at every level to access the insights they need, precisely when they need them.
As a science, AI dates to the 1950s. As its exponential adoption over the past couple of years indicates, AI will become a major contributor to future industrial growth.
In 2025, different areas of AI will continue to evolve and will be integrated much more closely, while barriers to entry will drop. Sophisticated analytics will become available at many more points across the industrial value chain, delivering end-to-end insights from shopfloor to top floor in a more humanized, conversational manner. This industrial intelligence will accelerate new pathways to efficiency, profitability and sustainability. The trend brings early investors in AI closer to Industry 5.0. In this Collaborative Age, humans and advanced technologies will join forces to provide prosperity while respecting the planet’s production limits.
Business leaders recognize the value of onboarding industrial AI to ensure operational agility, outpace competitors, and seize emerging opportunities. Nearly three-fourths (71%) of C-suite executives say investing in intelligence and insights is a priority for the next 12 months, according to the recent AVEVA Industrial Intelligence Index report.
We see three major AI business trends begin to play out as the science continues to evolve.
-
Humanized AI makes industrial intelligence widely available
Until recently, AI was typically designed for data teams and specialists, but that’s rapidly changing. The trend toward natural language and voice-based interfaces will allow operators with little or no technical training to interact more closely with all types of AI.
Expect productivity to increase as more non-expert industrial workers use AI to do their jobs better and solve problems in real time—without needing specialized training or even an understanding of how the technology works. New recruits, for example, will spend less time training on systems when they can ask a tool such as the Industrial AI Assistant for what they need and get it. Humanized AI will democratize data-driven decision-making, unlocking competitive advantages across the board.
-
AI becomes the basis of a simplified user experience
Think about how much time we spend learning to navigate different software and understanding their menus, commands, and shortcuts. With human-like interactions, AI will now be integrated as the ‘front end’ for industrial software systems. Instead of opening up dashboards and scrolling through various data inputs, we will simply be able to ask the system to generate a custom report or design an asset-specific console.
Generative AI (GenAI) is already helping us draft emails and create presentations. As the trend spreads to industrial settings, its benefits to businesses will show up as enhanced productivity, streamlined workflows and shorter time-to-value without heavy investment in retraining.
-
Applied AI becomes our industrial workhorse
AI is also becoming a sharper tool for operations and is evolving beyond enhancing efficiency. Predictive maintenance, for example, is now mainstream and is continuing to advance with the infusion of prescriptive and prognostic capabilities. Going forward, we’ll rely on industrial AI tools to do more of the heavy lifting, from crunching numbers to optimizing complex operations in real time.
GenAI will accelerate engineering timelines by further automating routine tasks. For example, in design, Generative Design AI (GenDAI) will automatically create optimized pipe layouts for a new factory, with set objectives to minimize overall tube length, reduce sharp bends for higher flow, and factor in space constraints.
In addition, Autonomous AI can now handle dynamic processes, responding to complex changes and disruptions near-instantaneously with human supervision. Thanks to reinforcement learning, AI-enabled systems can optimize even in transient situations such as startups, shutdowns, changes in input levels, and other unexpected disruptions.
The value here is threefold. Stabilizing operations within seconds means minimal losses and significantly less downtime. As a result, industrial resilience increases. Finally, time to value rises as AI tools handle the complex, time-consuming tasks.
How the evolution of industrial AI sets the stage for Industry 5.0
As AI improves our workplace experience, expect to hear the term Industry 5.0 more frequently. It’s about elevating human expertise with AI-driven insights to unlock new value more sustainably. We’re seeing the emergence of AI systems as dynamic partners, acting as ‘intelligent agents’ that are capable of autonomous action as they learn continuously from complex data streams. This is a significant step toward Agentic AI which, in turn, will eventually take us closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or true human-like intelligence.
As currently available technologies evolve towards Industry 5.0, attention will focus on Responsible AI, where AI applications are built according to safe, trustworthy and ethical principles. Expect to see frameworks for Responsible AI to ensure AI decisions are equitable, understandable and accountable. These frameworks will use practices like capturing citations to document inputs and outputs while protecting data and maintaining user privacy. AI will increasingly assist in complex tasks, such as process optimization and predictive analytics, but it will always work in collaboration with humans, who will have the final say.
This year offers a transformative moment to build adaptable and responsive organizations as AI bridges gaps, reduces complexity, and prepares businesses for the next phase of human and machine collaboration. Expect AI to become a true business partner, helping industrial workers think, act and stay ahead.
link