In the world of software-as-a-service, the pace at which industrial software company AVEVA is innovating and upgrading its portfolio has increased dramatically, chief product officer Rob McGreevy said during the May 20 keynote session of AVEVA World 2026, which is being held this week in Milan, Italy.

AVEVA is pursuing a range of product innovation in its industrial software portfolio. The keynote explored innovative new technologies AVEVA sees emerging and how these will impact on the company's customers and the verticals it serves.

With capital projects becoming ever more complex, companies were encouraged to pursue having a single digital thread, which will encompass the various tools they use and span all project phases. This will enable easier collaboration and governance and engender traceability into data documention and project information.

Customers had already gleaned tangible cost savings from implementing AVEVA’s solutions in this regard, McGreevy said, adding that the company was pursuing embedding AI into already established tools.

While AVEVA has been innovating for over a decade, the ever-changing environment has driven the need for software that is intuitive, intelligent and integrated, and this is guiding future innovations.

AVEVA CONNECT, the company’s open, cloud-native industrial intelligence platform, which allows data from assets to be unified, sent to the cloud, analysed and returned with actionable insights, is expanding integrations with enterprise data platforms.

The company is extending this industrial intelligence platform to Snowflake, as previously reported by Engineering News, as well as ServiceNow, providing customers with access to high-fidelity operational technology data within tools they are already using for analytics, industrial AI, automation and machine learning.

A major CONNECT release is slated for the first quarter of next year, comprising a range of new capabilities, including an industrial knowledge graph enabling faster construction, enrichment and operationalisation of digital twins.

This knowledge graph is posited to simplify troubleshooting and augment decision-making that directly impacts on operations and efficiency.

AVEVA will launch Flows in the second quarter of this year, with this anticipated to enable the assembly and deployment of data processing pipelines for real-time cleansing, filtering and transformation that simplifies data handling between systems and sources.

Flows brings in over 800 connectors, augmenting the data sources CONNECT can integrate with.

The combination of Flows, Twin Builder and the industrial knowledge graph with CONNECT’s existing data management, visualisation and AI capabilities, is expected to enhance the realisation of industrial digital twins with AI-ready data.

AVEVA is also embedding AI directly into tools and workflows where industrial teams operate.

From June, AVEVA Operations Control updates will deliver unified visualisation across the full operational stack, connecting human-machine interface, supervisory control and data acquisition and enterprise systems through CONNECT with a consistent design language and single operational data story.

AVEVA is also considering introducing model context protocol integrations and expanded AI server and client management capabilities to on-premise and cloud systems, enabling large language models and enterprise AI platforms to use contextualised operational data.

AVEVA is also introducing new unified engineering (UI) updates, firstly, through its Flows via CONNECT offering. Secondly, the company plans to launch UI for marine design in the fourth quarter of the year, with this set to deliver hull design, outfitting and 2D schematic production into a single connected solution.

The keynote underscored AVEVA’s keen focus on bolstering it footprint in the marine industry, with top ten global shipyards posited to be using the company’s technology.

AVEVA’s PI System portfolio is also set to benefit from a range of updates to make high-fidelity data more accessible, saleable and ready to support AI workloads, while maintaining industry-mandated security and governance standards.

This includes performance and scalability enhancements to the AVEVA PI server to support analytics and AI-intensive workloads at enterprises scale; more efficient movement of PI server data into CONNECT; and new Web-based management experiences for AVEVA adapters that simplify the configuration and scaling of industrial data collection.

AVEVA PI Vision will be upgraded in terms of trend analysis, navigation and usability, with the aim to expedite insight extraction from high-volume PI data environments.

AVEVA PI Audit reporter, a new Web-based audit trail review and reporting solution, developed in collaboration with Cognizant, will also be introduced.

*Tasneem Bulbulia is attending AVEVA World 2026 as a guest of AVEVA.