Powering the possible at AVEVA World 2026

At the opening of AVEVA World 2026 in Milan on 19 May, AVEVA’s chief executive officer Casper Herzberg highlighted how industrial intelligence breakthroughs can spark fresh possibilities at a time of a new operational reality

Addressing the packed gathering, the CEO of the leading global industrial software company addressed the challenges posed by increasing geopolitical volatility and unpredicatability, multiple paradigm shifts and a multipolar world of conflicts, economic warfare, trade disputes, tariffs and changing supply chains.

“Energy systems are being rewired not just to have electrification but to have resilience and redundancy as core motifs of this rewiring,” he said, citing the renewed focus on hydrocarbons, nuclear and coal. “So we have multiple build outs of generation assets all over the world.”

This trend will be intensified as generation assets are now strategic targets, making it all the more important to have multiple options.

“At the same time we are seeing the rise of generative, agentic and physical AI upending work, creating promises but also challenges in making those promises work in the industrial world we live in.”

As a result of all these pressures there is a “race to resilience”.

“What all these conflicts, these wars and trade disputes have reinforced is that those countries that diversify or have diversified their supply chains and their energy systems withstand these shocks better,” Herzberg said, adding that policies supporting resilience and multiple options will become a national imperative.

“This is not all doom and gloom, because hand in hand with these industrial policies and this need to diversify come infrastructure and digital capability investments, as not only companies but also states rebuild their value chain for redundancy and resilience. Our customers are powering this next generation of industrial infrastructure.”

Wood, for example is using AVEVA unified engineering, PI system, unified supply chain and CONNECT all together to create digital twins that reduce rework, improve collaboration, and preserve lifecycle continuity.

Going on to discuss innovation, Herzberg drew parallels with the Italian Renaissance, and the idea that humanity has to be at the centre of science and progress. “Today we face a lot of the same pressures, we have some amazing technological capabilities, we have the power of AI, but we must keep humanity, people at the centre of decision making.

“So this moment that I would call powering possibility is defined not only by volatility but by new possibilities, positive possibilities. Imagination is meeting digital capability. There are challenges, with the bottom line and increasing complexity, but there is a large positive opportunity that we can now access at a much faster pace than in the past. To seize that opportunity means creating scale, and creating scale requires integrated software. Intelligence means optimising performance, and that requires intelligent software, and empowering people requires intuitive software.

“That brings us to AVEVA and our quest to deliver software that is integrated, intelligent and intuitive.”

Herzberg charted AVEVA’s progress since the launch of its multi-year technology strategy in 2024. Highlighting some recent developments, he said,

“In the first quarter of this year our generative design assistant brought AI capabilities in unified engineering to our customers for the very first time, where predictive design models surface issues much earlier, and where automated point cloud intelligence reduces manual effort.”

The company also announced a lifecycle digital twin for the data centres of the future with Schneider and NVIDIA, which brought unified engineering process simulation and the PI System together in one capability via the NVIDIA Omniverse viewport.

New collaborations

Key to enhancing AVEVA’s capabilities has been its strong partner ecosystem.

“We’re all about the open partner-powered ecosystem. We believe in bringing everybody together for the benefit of industry and the customers we serve,” Herzberg said.

Herzberg announced several new partnerships to strengthen AVEVA’s innovation roadmap, including an agreement (subject to regulatory approval) to acquire Twinthread, a leading provider of predictive analytics, of digital twins and AI for industrial end markets. This will add an advanced AI layer to AVEVA’s data and analytics foundation on CONNECT, AVEVA’s industrial intelligence platform.

“It’s a super powerful capability that enables engineers to improve quality, throughput, asset life and energy efficiency much more rapidly,” Herzberg said.

AVEVA also announced a strategic collaboration with SnowFlake, the AI Data Cloud company, which establishes a direct, zero-copy integration between CONNECT and Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. It expands AVEVA’s cloud scale intelligence capabilities and enables data to be accessed and used without duplication, helping organisations to move from fragmented IT and OT systems to a governed, enterprise-wide data foundation.

Another strategic partnership between AVEVA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will accelerate the delivery of industrial intelligence in the cloud, seeing AVEVA expand its CONNECT platform on AWS as part of its broader move to a multi-cloud architecture. By bring CONNECT and the broader AVEVA portfolio to AWS, the two companies aim to give industrial customers a faster, more scalable path to cloud-native operations, reducing the complexity and cost of managing on-premises infrastructure while enabling new AI-driven capabilities that were previously impractical at scale.

Further embodying the spirit of radical collaboration, AVEVA announced a new partnership with IFS, a global leader in industrial AI, to advance AI-powered Continuous Asset Decision Intelligence. The new solution is designed to turn real-time operational and asset data into smarter maintenance, investment and execution decisions across the integrated asset lifecycle, unifying operational intelligence, enterprise execution and strategic capital planning and creating one connected decision flow where every participant in the value chain has the information and AI-enriched insight they need to act with speed and confidence.

“Our partnership with IFS connects data and insights in powerful new ways, from sensor to boardroom,” Herzberg said.

2026 will be a year of acceleration for AVEVA, as AI increasingly transforms industry.

“First we‘re going to double down on industrial AI, and CONNECT is the backbone that enables that. There will be much more investment in those capabilities,” Herzberg said.

“Second, we are increasingly focused on cloud native analytics, AI and digital twins and applications.” AVEVA leaders expanded on the details in following sessions.

New solutions and features will include a digital twin builder that publishes engineering content all the way to CONNECT; an intelligent industrial knowledge graph that contextualises data to PI; enhanced capabilities for PI and PI Vision; a new intuitive UX for CONNECT; and unified engineering and unified visualisation by HMI SCADA on CONNECT.

The opening session of AVEVA World also saw AVEVA customers share their insights and experiences of harnessing the power of digital innovation to open new possibilities. The USA’s TC Energy is using AVEVA software to optimise power supplies to customers across the US market; Porsche MotorSport is using data-driven insights to drive winning performance; and Italy’s Saipem is blending industrial AI and AVEVA Unified Engineering in the cloud, enabling teams to optimise design efficiency, carbon footprint and speed to market.

AVEVA World 2026 is the largest ever edition of AVEVA’s annual flagship conference, bringing together around 4,000 industry leaders, innovators and engineers including 200 students from local universities.