In heavy-asset industries such as energy, the future won’t be built on AI alone, or on digital twins alone. It will be built on both — together — embedded in the daily flow of work.
To succeed in the new digital era, companies can’t afford to treat AI and digital twins as distant concepts. They need to be embedded in maintenance rounds, risk assessments, and optimization strategies so they help people make better decisions, faster.
The numbers are stark: In the software world, 90% of code could soon be AI-written. Millions of jobs may shift in the next few years. But the industrial reality is different. That reality is messy and unpredictable. Context — and the ability to act on it — matters.
Transformation won’t come from more standalone dashboards or siloed applications. It will come from digital fluency — the ability for information to move seamlessly between people, systems, and decisions. When a finding from the reliability engineers loops back into strategy, when an early risk signal moves swiftly through to operations, when optimization decisions are driven by live operational context, AI and digital twins stop being “projects” and start being performance drivers.
But before we can have that future, we have to lay the groundwork: clean, structured, contextualized data; clear processes for how tasks are triggered, escalated, and completed; and decisions anchored to where operations actually happen. At Kongsberg Digital, we see this as a rules-based challenge. Consistent logic applied across the foundation makes it possible to scale use cases across the organization.
Once that foundation is in place, the digital twin evolves into something more powerful: an industrial work surface. It’s not just a 3D model or repository of historical data. It’s a live, collaborative environment where teams work together, moving from insight to action without losing context.
And this is already happening. Imagine a methane leak detected in a compressor subsystem: the control room operator launches a digital SOP, instantly alerting emergency response and pre-populating the work system with tasks, documentation, and live sensor data. A mitigation plan appears with owners, timelines, and risk controls ready to go. From detection to resolution, every action is captured in the twin —auditable, traceable, and visible to everyone who needs it.
AI plays a crucial role here — not as a replacement for people, but as an augmentation layer. Our Asset Copilot bridges gaps, integrates systems, and automates contextualization. Asset Copilot lets teams “talk” to the asset for history, performance, and upcoming tasks. And the Work Canvas becomes a shared digital workbench where everyone sees the same reality. The twin is the foundation, AI is the co-pilot, and your team is still in the pilot’s seat.
The next evolution of AI we are seeing in industry is agentic AI — autonomous digital agents capable of initiating, coordinating, and completing multi-step industrial tasks. Unlike passive analytics tools, agentic AI operates with industrial context awareness, drawing on the full depth of an operational digital twin. For example, an agent could detect a developing pump anomaly, cross-reference it against historical performance, automatically trigger the correct SOP, mobilize the right field crew, and log every action in real time — without human intervention at each step.
Our approach keeps the human firmly in control, but removes the friction between detection and execution. In the same way that our Asset Copilot can answer “what happened” and “why,” AI agents collaborate to determine “what should happen next” — and where digital fluency makes it happen — all the while being grounded in the operational truth of the asset. This is AI not as an add-on, but as an embedded operational teammate.
The winners in this new industrial era won’t simply be those with more information. They’ll be the ones who achieve digital fluency — companies whose teams move in digital sync, with no loss of context from one shift to the next, and where every decision is informed by shared understanding, further enabled by AI.
At Kongsberg Digital, we’re building the infrastructure for that kind of future — where digital twins and AI are the connective tissue of high-level industrial performance.
