New Way Now: Honeywell paves the way from automation to autonomy with Google Cloud

*Featured in this video:* Suresh Venkatarayalu, SVP, CTO, and President of Connected Enterprise for Honeywell *Executive summary:* Honeywell, a leading global industrial technology company, partnered with Google Cloud to tackle some of the industry’s long-standing challenges with AI. Using Vertex AI (which has evolved into Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform), Google’s Gemini models, and BigQuery, Honeywell deployed purpose-built agents, grounded in decades of company expertise and knowledge, that can generate complex 100-plus-page design proposals and technical documents, shrinking project design timelines from months to weeks. In addition, Honeywell is also using Gemini to digitize 1.2 million product SKUs to power an agent that can instantly identify the impact of raw material price changes and suggest improvements or redesign ideas for its 5,000 engineers. *Challenge:* Industrial technology companies are often slowed down by time-consuming, ad-hoc engineering processes that waste resources, limit problem-solving, and delay innovation. Honeywell was looking to drive digitization and automation to modernize project engineering while also enabling its 5,000 product engineers to adapt more efficiently to market fluctuations and unforeseen issues. *Solution:* Partnering with Google Cloud, Honeywell used Vertex AI, Gemini, and BigQuery to create purpose-built agents that automate product design tasks and reduce project design cycles. Grounded in decades of company expertise and knowledge, including the dataset on its industrial IoT platform Honeywell Forge, these agents can already generate complex design proposals and technical specification documents — often hundreds of pages long — with high accuracy. Honeywell also launched a parallel initiative to digitize 1.2 million product SKUs with Gemini 2.5, powering a new agent that can rapidly analyze product attributes, identify which are impacted by market fluctuations like raw material price changes, and suggest alternative components, product improvements, and redesign ideas. *Results:* These new specialized AI agents are just the first step towards building Honeywell’s vision for the future: autonomous industrial operations. Project engineering tasks, such as writing proposals or creating detailed technical design documents, can now be done in hours, shrinking project design timelines from months to hours. Honeywell also estimates that using agents to get new ideas and insights will help optimize and redesign products faster than ever before. *Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Suresh Venkatarayalu, SVP, CTO, and President of Connected Enterprise for Honeywell:* → “Traditionally, we would have spent most of our time doing voice of customer, talking to them, walking through their manufacturing facilities, and producing a proposal document and the design document. These are complex, hundreds of pages. The processes were more ad hoc and there weren't any tools to capture the requirements, creating a lot of waste in the system. It would take two to three months. With the advent of all the agents, you can actually flip from automation to semi-autonomy and full autonomy in certain areas.” → “We actually went and took the last 20 to 30 years of knowledge repositories, along with our Forge platform, and we decided to really pull Gemini and Vertex AI and BigQuery on top. BigQuery primarily as our data infrastructure, then we use Vertex AI for developing tools and agents on top of the models. It’s really a big breakthrough. The time it would've taken from initial proposal to design freeze — if it has taken two to three months, now should be in weeks.” → “We are digitizing close to 1.2 million SKUs, and we are codifying them in Gemini 2.5. An agent will go back and understand which product and what cross margin is going to be eroded, and then we have another agent coming back with solutions and ideas around how you can redesign those products. This will be an absolute game-changer.” *Google Cloud products used:* Gemini, Vertex AI (which has evolved into Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform), BigQuery *Learn more:* → Honeywell and Google Cloud to Accelerate Autonomous Operations with AI Agents for the Industrial Sector https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2024/10/honeywell-and-google-cloud-to-accelerate-autonomous-operations-with-ai-agents-for-the-industrial-sector