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Emerson introduced new Ovation AI Agents for the power and water industries, expanding the AI capabilities of the Ovation Automation Platform 4.0 release. The five new agents—Sequence Assistant Agent, Alarm Insight Agent, Predictive Maintenance Agent, Root Cause Agent, and Loop Performance Monitor Agent—are intended to empower plant personnel with critical insights by continuously monitoring, analyzing, and recommending actions across critical plant operations.
This expansion builds on the Ovation Virtual Advisor and delivers new capabilities to Ovation’s portfolio of AI solutions for the power and water industry. While Ovation Virtual Advisor provides real-time, AI-driven insights through natural language interaction, the new AI Agents are time-synchronized with the Ovation 4.0 system and work autonomously in the background, continuously monitoring plant and equipment conditions and recommending optimizations.
The Ovation AI Agents will be deployed in phases, with the following included in the first wave:
Sequence Assistant Agent: Provides AI guidance for sequence-function-driven control logic tools by generating context-aware prompts from real-time deviations and historical failures. During a steam turbine startup, for example, the agent can pinpoint why a sequence has stalled and alert an operator with recommended corrective action, resolving in seconds issues that traditionally could take hours of manual investigation.
Alarm Insight Agent: Prioritizes and summarizes alarm context during alarm floods, helping operators focus on the most critical alarms and recommended actions rather than being overwhelmed by hundreds of alerts simultaneously.
Predictive Maintenance Agent: Acts as an early-warning system for critical plant equipment, detecting degradation, prioritizing maintenance, and helping prevent unplanned failures.
Root Cause Agent: Performs real-time root cause analysis that goes beyond the control system itself to analyze the running plant process. By correlating alarms, trips, and live equipment conditions, the agent identifies root causes of critical asset issues, enabling maintenance teams to shift from reactive to proactive actions.
Loop Performance Monitor Agent: Continuously analyzes control loop performance to identify poorly performing loops, including those experiencing issues such as oscillation, deadband, and deficient tuning, and generates evidence-backed recommendations for engineering review.
Emerson’s new AI agents are designed to integrate seamlessly with the Ovation 4.0 Automation Platform. Built with a human-in-the-loop design, the agents operate proactively, running in the background and alerting operators to issues while taking action only with human approval. Every recommendation flows through human operators, who retain full control.
Early deployments demonstrate measurable impact. In one scenario, the Sequence Assistant Agent identified a failed permissive condition in seconds—a diagnosis that would have previously consumed hours of manual investigation across logic diagrams and point values. At another major utility, the Predictive Maintenance Agent captured a subtle equipment anomaly before it became critical, preventing costly unplanned downtime.
The five new Ovation AI Agents will launch this fall, enabling customers to begin deploying individual agents tailored to their operational priorities and expand their portfolios over time as their needs evolve. The broader roadmap includes an additional 28 planned agents spanning operations, maintenance, optimization, instrumentation and control, management, and cross-domain functions.
Find out more about Industrial AI’s Role in the Digital Transformation of Manufacturing Industries.