Industrial software company AVEVA and global business school IMD launched the inaugural ‘Industrial Intelligence Report on Digital Ecosystems and the Future of Connected Industries’ at AVEVA World 2026 in Milan, Italy, last week, revealing a discord between digital ecosystem goals and execution.

Encompassing both quantitative analysis and detailed interviews with experts, the report outlines how organisations can use industrial intelligence to build, orchestrate and scale business ecosystems.

It defines industrial intelligence as organisational capability that integrates operational technology, IT and AI to enable connected, data-driven decision-making across entire industrial ecosystems.

The report draws on inputs from over 275 senior leaders across 12 industry sectors and 19 expert interviews.

It finds that organisations are aiming to build digital ecosystems to confront higher-order business challenges, such as innovating faster, navigating supply volatility or decarbonising complex global operations.

However, despite this drive, the report revealed a paradox, showing that while 74% of leaders considered digital ecosystems a top strategic priority and 82% planne to increase engagement in the near future, only 27% report sharing data substantially or extensively with ecosystem partners, with a reticence to share identified, AVEVA CEO Caspar Herzberg explained, presenting key findings of the study.

Only 9% of organisations have achieved cross-organisational data governance, while 3% have AI as the backbone of ecosystem coordination.  

The report shows that the majority of organisations are investing in digital ecosystem strategy, while underinvesting in the operational foundations that make ecosystems work.

Several illustrative case studies underscore the gap between ambition and execution, with integration complexity, legacy systems and weak governance.

Understanding why that gap persists, and how organisations are beginning to close it, has been identified as a strategic imperative to succeed in the current volatile operating environment.

Herzberg pointed out that the aim was to understand the motivations behind the move to digital ecosystems, as well as define the frameworks, competencies and leadership practices that would concretely enable companies to transcend silos and build more adaptive, ecosystem-driven operating models.

Where ecosystems are working, companies are said to be gleaning tangible value through harnessing their industrial intelligence.

Ecosystems are said to be delivering measurable operational value in areas such as customer experience, commercialisation speed and ecosystem-wide automation. However, monetising new ecosystem-driven revenue streams, sustainability and co-development, and joint innovation are not being capitalised on.

The real barriers are indicated to be structural, rather than competitiveness, despite the latter typically being perceived with concern. Rather, the challenges lie in integrating heterogenous technologies across organisational boundaries, ensuring that data and systems are secure and demonstrating return on investment.

“Governance, integration and learning matter more right now than algorithms. Ecosystems are already delivering operational value. The next phase is about converting that foundation into strategic advantage through better data sharing, coordination, clearer roles and more deliberate leadership,” IMD Global Centre for Digital and AI Transformation director and Strategy and Digital professor Michael Wade said.

The report posits that the organisations most likely to lead the next phase of digital ecosystem development would be those that solve problems currently preventing ecosystems from delivering.

At the event, AVEVA also presented three global case studies of customers using industrial intelligence to change how they design, build, operate and compete.

An Italian company highlighted that technology is transforming how it operates, deepening collaboration and accelerating projects. The company underscored the need to be clear about expectations from this, with it to be grounded in the value to customers and implemented programmatically.

TC Energy, from North America, emphasised the importance of having a clear plan and vision for what the organisation wants to achieve to ensure operational resilience and scalability, for the business to be future ready.

Porsche Motorsport and Porsche Formula E, one of AVEVA’s newest partners, highlighted that it uses integrated insights to help teams process data faster.

Meanwhile, in a “Digital Intelligence in Action” roundtable, held on the sidelines of the event, data cloud company Snowflake Manufacturing VP Tim Long cited that his experiences with customers had shown that successful digital organisations were those that had invested in a strong data foundation, and were able to use this to leverage AI.

“We don’t have an AI technology problem, there’s tonnes of AI technology available, and it’s amazing what’s innovating . . . Organisations struggle because they have a fragmentation problem, because the data exists in different places, and they can’t rationalise across those systems.

“Those I’ve seen be very successful, embrace the latest technology, but are empowered by having strong data foundations,” he explained.

AVEVA announced at the event that it had entered into a strategic collaboration with Snowflake, expanding its cloud scale intelligence capability, providing fast and secure access to operational, engineering and enterprise data without data duplication (see associated article). 

Speakers also underscored the importance of organisations building capabilities and providing access for employees to tools to facilitate this; ensuring that human oversight remained pivotal; and balancing between onboarding new technology and retaining old skills and expertise.

*Tasneem Bulbulia was a guest of AVEVA at the AVEVA World 2026 conference.