Dive Brief:
- Honeywell Technologies on Wednesday introduced Forge Cognition, what the company describes as a self-contained agentic AI and simulation platform for facility operations across buildings, campuses and industrial operations.
- The platform, developed in tandem with Nvidia and Dell Technologies, connects to existing deployments and adds AI capabilities to Honeywell Technologies, combining assets and systems data in a way that enables AI agents to “discover, contextualize and analyze equipment behavior, and the relationship between systems,” the company said.
- The system will provide smarter alarm management, predictive asset health and energy intelligence, according to Honeywell. The technology can be operated in manual, semi-autonomous or autonomous modes, with operators able to set the level of oversight and control, it says.
Dive Insight:
Honeywell Technologies CEO Vimal Kapur hinted at the company’s plans to launch building and process automation products into high-growth verticals like data centers, healthcare and hospitality during the company’s second-quarter earings call in July. At the time, Kapur noted that Honeywell’s AI-assisted Forge cloud platform is becoming important to its growth strategy, although it is still a small part of its business.
Honeywell says Forge Cognition’s open, interoperable architecture converges IT and operational environments, with the goal of helping building operators make their infrastructure more intelligent while leveraging AI and computing technologies from Nvidia and Dell.
The company is piloting the platform at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, the Fairmont Hotel in Dubai, NEX Mall in Singapore, Honeywell’s own campuses in Bangalore and Richardson, Texas, as well as Nvidia’s Voyager campus in Santa Clara, California. At Nvidia’s campus, the pilot showed a reduction in unnecessary alerts by as much as 90% and identified a potential reduction in energy use of up to 10%, while maintaining a comfort score of about 95%, as measured by temperature, humidity and CO2 across zones.
The system uses Nvidia’s open models to power agents that interpret data, simulate operational changes and summarize live or recorded sensor data, according to Honeywell. The AI infrastructure is underpinned by Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, which includes Dell’s PowerEdge XE servers, AI data platform and storage engines and cyber resiliency solutions.
“The physical world demands more than a powerful AI model,” Suresh Venkatarayalu, chief technology officer at Honeywell Technologies, said in a statement. “It requires AI to understand how systems actually operate and interact — that is where the next breakthrough is happening.
Honeywell is scheduled to release its third-quarter earnings report on Oct. 22. It will be the second report without its aerospace division, which it spun off earlier this year to focus on automation specialties in building, process and industrial systems.
