In a volatile world, with multiple paradigm shifts and transitions unfolding, unprecedented levels of technology growth offer many opportunities that can be leveraged. Industrial software company AVEVA is aiming to capitalise on these opportunities by providing software that is integrated, intelligent and intuitive, to create scale, optimise performance and empower the workforce, AVEVA CEO Caspar Herzberg said at the group's global conference AVEVA World 2026, which is being held this week in Milan, Italy.

To fulfil these ambitions, the company will this year accelerate foundational innovation work it started in 2024, when it laid out its multiyear technology strategy.

“This is the year we want to accelerate even more, because we believe that AI is becoming transformative in the world of industry, where it will shift what we deliver and how we deliver it,” he acclaimed.

Herzberg pointed out that already, in the first quarter of this year, AVEVA’s generative design assistant brought AI capabilities and unified engineering to its customers for the first time, predictive design models surfaced issues much earlier and automated point cloud intelligence reduced manual effort.

Moreover, the company also announced lifecycle digital twins for AI data centres for NVIDIA, Schneider Electric and ETAP.

AVEVA is now pursuing key strategic developments and collaborations, which Herzberg announced at the event.  

Firstly, AVEVA has entered into an agreement to acquire industrial cloud platform Twinthread, subject to regulatory approval. Herzberg described the target company as a leading provider of predictive analytics of digital twins and AI for industrial end markets.

“It not only strengthens our innovation roadmap, but it adds an advanced AI layer to AVEVA’s data and analytics foundation on AVEVA CONNECT,” he pointed out.

Launched in 2024, CONNECT is AVEVA’s open, cloud-native industrial intelligence platform, which allows data from assets to be unified, sent to the cloud, analysed and returned with actionable insights.

With predictive analytics already available, these additions now provide a “super powerful capability” that enables engineers to improve quality, throughput, asset life and energy efficiency much more rapidly and seamlessly, Herzberg averred.

Secondly, AVEVA has entered into a strategic collaboration with data cloud company Snowflake, expanding its cloud scale intelligence capability, providing fast and secure access to operational, engineering and enterprise data without data duplication, Herzberg outlined.

The collaboration establishes a direct, zero-copy integration between AVEVA’s CONNECT and Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, enabling customers to securely access, analyse and activate industrial and enterprise data, negating the need for complex data pipelines or costly integration projects.

Thirdly, AVEVA announced a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the delivery of industrial intelligence in the cloud.

The agreement builds on the established relationship with AWS, providing a framework for joint technology development, go-to-market execution and customer migration support across the global industrial sector.

Under the terms of the agreement, AVEVA will expand CONNECT on AWS. By using services including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AVEVA will deliver both public and private software-as-a-service capabilities for industrial customers worldwide.

Herzberg highlighted this as a fundamental shift towards being multi-cloud, with the company aiming to be on every meaningful cloud platform.

The collaboration also entails listing AVEVA products on AWS Marketplace, joint customer migration programmes and a shared commitment to training and certification across both organisations.

Fourth, Herzberg unveiled a new partnership with AI-powered enterprise software provider IFS, to enable complex industrial organisations to connect operational intelligence, enterprise execution and strategic capital planning.

The first solution under this collaboration is Continuous Asset Decision Intelligence, which is designed to turn real-time operational and asset data into smarter maintenance, investment and execution decisions across the integrated asset lifecycle.

The joint solution connects three layers in a single architecture, combining operational and engineering intelligence with strategic capital planning.

IFS CEO Mark Moffat joined Herzberg on stage at AVEVA World to commemorate the announcement, which the latter lauded as an example of “radical collaboration”.  

“One of the things that I’m so excited about, in terms of the AVEVA partnership, is, together, we’re beginning to think about how we close the gap between all of the operational insight and intelligence that this room has, with the business case of how to invest capital wisely . . . because we've seen so much wastage in industrial operations over decades,” Moffat commented.

He explained that intelligence and insight did not often translate into upstream capital allocation, planning and portfolio decisioning, nor into the downstream execution and maintenance of assets in the field.

Herzberg also emphasised the importance of ensuring humans were at the centre of innovation and progress, with technology capabilities not meant to overrule human oversight.

*Tasneem Bulbulia is attending AVEVA World 2026 as a guest of AVEVA.