INTERVIEW Is agentic AI the key to autonomous operations? AVEVA’s Lori Warda explains why agentic AI has the potential to revolutionise industrial operations and shares how the company plans to work with Microsoft to advance the technology BY REBECCA GIBSON Designed to understand complex workflows and execute actions to achieve goals autonomously with minimal guidance from humans, agentic AI solutions are set to make automating industrial operations easier than ever before. Lori Warda, AI product director at AVEVA, gives an insight into the benefits, challenges and potential future applications for the technology in the industrial sector. What is agentic AI and how does it differ from generative AI? Generative AI focuses on creating content by using large language models to generate text. It is an invaluable technology for improving access to industrial information and presenting it in a human-friendly and intuitive way. On the other hand, agentic AI is more autonomous. It can make decisions, take actions and operate in a loop, continuously improving and adapting. Agentic AI marks the next level in AI development and has the potential to revolutionise industrial operations. Agentic AI follows a four-step process: it gathers and processes data, performs reasoning, takes action – whether making recommendations or executing tasks – and continuously learns to improve outcomes. The key difference is its autonomy. It handles more complex tasks than generative AI and allows for the integration of different functions and agents, making it even more powerful. Can you provide examples of how agentic AI is used in industrial operations? One major area we’re exploring is the early stages of digital twin development. Currently, mapping data between different systems is a manual process. For example, if one system labels a piece of equipment as Pump 101 and another calls it Pump 101A, an individual must manually establish that connection. With agentic AI, we aim to automate this mapping “Agentic AI marks the next level in AI development and has the potential to revolutionise industrial operations” 92
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