ABB leads shift to autonomous operations with Genix Industrial AI platform on Azure

Turning disruption into transformation

Industries are grappling with increasingly complex demands, striving to balance reliability, efficiency, and sustainability. At the same time, they are under mounting pressure from workforce gaps, rising costs, and sustainability mandates, all of which are driving a need to rethink how they operate.

“Yet traditional systems often leave critical data siloed, making it difficult to respond to these competing priorities. As a result, everyone from shop floor engineers to executives can miss out on the actionable insights necessary for quick, informed responses to these pressures,” explains Mangesh Nawarange, Digital Lead, AMEA Hub, Energy Industries at ABB.

The challenge is clear: to remain competitive and resilient, organizations must find a way to break down these barriers and unlock the full potential of their data and teams.

The shift to autonomous operations

By integrating operational, engineering, and IT data into a scalable industrial AI platform, ABB offers real-time, contextual insights that empower decision-makers at every level. This shift allows organizations to move beyond automation, adopting autonomous operations that self-optimize and adapt to changing market demands, regulatory requirements, and customer needs.

ABB accomplishes this through its platform, Genix Industrial IoT and AI Suite, incorporating Microsoft Azure and agents and models in Foundry Agent Service. Using enterprise-wide data, the platform employs a multi-agent architecture, allowing AI agents to autonomously execute complex workflows across assets, operations, supply chain, energy, and emission management. This approach enables context-aware decision-making and optimization in real time. The Genix suite of more than 50 industrial applications helps to drive efficiency, reliability, and sustainability.

“When we bring in human–AI collaboration, AI cannot be just a technology that humans can consume. It needs to come in as a trusted assistant,” says Rajesh Ramachandran, Global Chief Digital Officer, Process Automation at ABB. “Genix Copilot unleashes the generative and agentic AI power of Azure, bringing transformative impact across the field, shop floor engineers, functional specialists, and industry executives—all while empowering our teams to work smarter and faster.”

Achieving breakthrough results

Genix enables natural language interaction with enterprise data via Genix Copilot, empowering frontline workers and decision-makers alike.

One example is Birla Opus Paints, a manufacturer under the Aditya Birla Group. Tasked with building six greenfield factories, the company partnered with ABB to make its operations digitally ready from day one. “We wanted insight into production, but it’s about more than that. We needed data about a variety of parameters—productivity, quality, safety, environmental, health, and ESG,” explains Anish Kumar, Supply Chain Lead at Birla Opus Paints. “All of that data is integrated and coming in the Genix Industrial AI platform.”

By using AI capabilities in Genix, the company gains insights into its enterprise data to operate more efficiently. In a batch-based production environment, Birla Opus improved its “Right First Time” rate from 30% to 35% to a whopping 80% and beyond in its first year. Root cause analysis that once took a week now takes an hour. With Genix’s Advanced Planning and Scheduling tool, the company can forecast production 15 days ahead, improving consistency and customer commitment.

Similar stories are unfolding across ABB’s global customer base. “Our customers are moving from preventive to predictive maintenance. They’re using Genix to unify data, monitor asset health, and even forecast failures weeks in advance,” says Nawarange.

Undeniable impacts for the future

Genix is delivering measurable impact across industries. “With Genix Copilot, engineers on the shop floor facing a critical error in gas analyzers or drives can now simply scan a QR code, and within seconds, multiple AI agents collaborate—pulling real-time data, correlating it with error and maintenance logs, and combining insights from manuals and expert knowledge stores—to deliver a resolution to the issue. This enables 24/7 self-service to fix the issues quickly and automate the service tickets as needed,” explains Ramachandran. “We’ve seen a 60% to 80% reduction in troubleshooting time.”

Using Genix Industrial AI, ABB’s customers have seen up to a 20% improvement in the reliability of critical assets and up to a 60% reduction in unplanned downtime in energy-intensive industries.

“With Microsoft, we’re able to bring cutting-edge AI innovations into industrial operations, combining our technology and domain expertise to drive lasting impact. It’s about enabling ABB and our customers to outperform, leaner and cleaner,” concludes Ramachandran.

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