‘Honeywell tech trims routine factory work’

The American multinational company, which has operated in India for eight decades, counts top conglomerates such as Reliance and Adani groups among its clients. It provides industrial automation solutions for power, oil and gas, steel and mining and sectors.

“What we’re trying to build is a higher degree of automation, akin to autonomous cars, inside refinery plants," said Ashish Gaikwad, managing director of Honeywell Automation India Ltd. “This can ensure that operators do not do mundane things, but take more commercially savvy decisions. AI and ML algorithms can do all mundane tasks and even take basic decisions, which can help with a lesser human workforce willing to work in plants. Reliance Industries, for instance, has standardized the use of Honeywell’s digital twins to train thousands of operators at its Jamnagar refinery, " Gaikwad said in an interview.

Honeywell Automation India clocked ₹3,575 crore operating revenue and ₹438 crore net profit in FY23, up 17.9% and 29.2% from the previous year. The conglomerate also has a private entity, Honeywell India, which operates its non-automation subsidiaries. India, however, accounts for less than 1.5% of the company’s global revenue.

In industrial automation, Honeywell competes with ABB, General Electric, Rockwell Automation and Siemens, among others.

Honeywell companies in India together employ more than 5,000 engineers, said Gavin Towler, chief technology officer of Honeywell Performance Materials & Technologies (PMT). “We spend around 4% of the overall revenue as R&D, and more than half of our engineers are here—which means that a significant chunk of our annual budget comes here. But it’s not just about an annual employee spend—high-tech R&D is very capital-intensive. For instance, we spent over $100 million in building research capabilities at our Delhi lab," he said.

The company executives, however, did not disclose Honeywell’s R&D budget for India.Towler also said its India laboratories conduct multiple global projects, including “global product life cycle impact and carbon footprint assessment for sustainability in Madurai, and converting rural biogas to distributable natural gas, as well as creating sustainable aviation fuel from waste products, in Gurugram."

The company also handles industrial operations for clients, including automatic control systems at Reliance Industries’ Jamnagar refinery, and the piped distribution system for Adani Gas. These, Gaikwad said, are showing increasing adoption of industry 4.0 initiatives.

“Control systems need to understand long-term trends and unpredictable system occurrences in mass industrial machinery. This is where AI and ML-based technologies are stepping in, through tools that sit on top of all that data and the control system." he said.

However, while adoption of industrial AI is increasing at scale, the company remains cautious in its approach to nascent fields such as generative AI. “It’s still very early days for new areas of AI such as generative AI, especially to assess its long-term impact. We generally underestimate a technology’s impact in the long term, and overestimate it in the short term," Towler said.