Kongsberg Digital’s presentation set out to address a dilemma many organisations now face: despite years of investment in sensors, analytics and digital workflows, the day-to-day experience of industrial work has become more complicated, not less. Aston Villa explained that rising energy demand and the growing pressure on supply chains have driven businesses to generate huge volumes of data in an attempt to understand their assets, but that this abundance has weighed heavily on the people expected to act on it. Kongsberg Digital’s response is the “industrial work surface”, a connected environment that places context, collaboration and real-time intelligence in one place to reduce the mental strain of navigating multiple tools.
A second thread ran through the session: the need to rethink how simulation and AI interact. The company argued that high-fidelity process models remain essential because they are grounded in physics and engineering truth, yet they are often too slow or too complex to use at scale. By training machine learning models on structured simulation data, agents can shoulder much of the heavy computational and repetitive work, allowing experts to focus on interpretation rather than setup. This combination of physics-based modelling and agentic assistance opens the door to rapid scenario testing across entire value chains, whether assessing power constraints, production shifts or the effect of extreme weather.
Throughout the presentation, one message remained consistent: technology must serve people, not overshadow them. Kongsberg Digital emphasised that even the most advanced agentic frameworks should ultimately support human judgement, offering prescriptive options rather than autonomous action. With the right balance, organisations can reduce cognitive overload, democratise access to complex simulation, and help teams make decisions that are both fast and responsible. In this view, the future of industrial optimisation is not merely digital—it is collaborative, transparent and designed around the realities of modern work.
Speakers
- Øystein Hole, Chief Product Officer, Kongsberg Digital
