Honeywell Outlines its AI-Driven Path to Autonomous Operations at the 2026 HUG Conference

At the recent Honeywell User Group Meeting in Phoenix, we at ARC got to witness many new product announcements that all incorporate industrial AI. Honeywell has clearly made a lot of progress in developing industrial AI-based solutions for the world of automation, but one of the real standouts was the talk of a project that Honeywell did with Borouge in the UAE that was announced in this press release back in January. To my knowledge at least, this is the first project that successfully proved that a process plant can be controlled autonomously with an AI-powered solution. We’ve seen other projects where AI makes decisions, but not to the level where this was done in a truly autonomous way. At the center of it all is Honeywell Experion Cognition, an AI-powered automation platform that had its official debut at the event. 

Who is Borouge?

Based in Abu Dhabi, Borouge is a joint venture between the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and Borealis of Austria. The company was founded in 1998. Borouge supplies polyolefin plastics, including polyethylene and polypropylene. In March 2025, ADNOC and OMV announced the merger of Borouge with Borealis and the acquisition of Nova Chemicals for $9.7 billion, creating a $60 billion global polyolefins producer that is the fourth-largest in the world by production capacity.

About the Project

In 2025, Borouge started initial trials to develop the industry’s first AI-driven control room for full-scale, real-time operations in collaboration with Honeywell. The initiative is a core component of Borouge’s AI, Digitalization & Technology (AI&DT) program, which targeted $575 million in value generation in 2025 through a portfolio of AI- and digital-led initiatives.

The proof-of-concept project was officially announced in January 2026. The project focused on AI-powered autonomous operations at its Ruwais facility. This milestone supports Borouge’s strategy to “enhance operational performance, strengthen long-term competitiveness, and contribute to ADNOC’s ambition to become the world’s most AI-enabled energy company.”

A First Step Toward Full-Scale, Real-Time Operations

The POC marks tangible progress toward developing the petrochemical industry’s first AI-driven control room for full-scale, real-time operations. Conducted in a live production environment, the results indicate the potential to increase efficiency by up to 20 percent, enhance reliability by reducing downtime by 20 percent, and improve production performance while lowering operating costs by up to 15 percent. Borouge reports that the technology also enhances process safety and supports more sustainable operations by significantly reducing both energy consumption and emissions.

Experion Cognition Dashboard on Display at the 2026 Honeywell User Group Meeting

According to Hazeem Sultan Al Suwaidi, Chief Executive Officer of Borouge, “This milestone reinforces Borouge’s commitment to accelerating growth, enhancing shareholder value, and driving efficiency. By advancing autonomous operations in partnership with Honeywell, we are strengthening our competitive position.”

According to Jim Masso, President and CEO of Honeywell Process Automation, “Our collaboration with Borouge demonstrates how AI-enabled autonomous operations can be deployed safely and effectively in a live production environment. This milestone highlights the potential of advanced connected solutions to deliver meaningful improvements in efficiency, reliability, and operational performance at scale.”

Following the successful proof-of-concept with Honeywell, Borouge will advance work to further demonstrate the potential of autonomous operations and assess opportunities to scale the technology across its Ruwais facilities.

More About Experion Cognition

The Honeywell User Group Meeting marked the official launch of the Experion Cognition application that was also used in the Borouge project. One of several AI-powered applications launched at HUG, Experion Cognition incorporates several AI-enabled features including an Operations Assistant. According to Honeywell, “In multiple pilots, the platform was able to make predictions an average of 5 to 10 minutes before alarm incidents.” The application can seamlessly integrate into existing control room environments and will be commercially available in Q3 2026.

Experion Cognition can proactively detect and mitigate abnormal situations before they happen, helping reduce both abnormal situations and downtime. It also allows the operator to focus on an ever-widening range of responsibilities rather than having to respond to abnormal situations that can lead to plant incidents. 

In the Experion Cognition press release, Jim Masso again notes that “The industry has talked about autonomous control rooms for years—and now, Experion Cognition brings autonomous control rooms into production, driving safer operations and stronger performance in complex environments... with AI-powered agents actively managing process abnormalities, operators can consistently achieve better results, day after day.” The platform combines Honeywell’s decades of process automation expertise with AI models to proactively act on behalf of the operator to help resolve anomalies in the control room, among other features. 

ARC has been talking about the wave of retirements impacting the process industry for years, and it’s only accelerating. As longtime experienced operators retire at increasing rates, it is getting harder to capture their automation expertise in a digital way. Automating the process of abnormal situation management can help solve this skill gap. By delegating those cognitive tasks to autonomous agents, Experion Cognition can enable less experienced operators to run plants with the comparable knowledge of a veteran operator.

Experion Cognition offers a path to autonomous operations, but it also gives the user flexibility to keep the “human in the loop,” where Cognition alerts the user to potential issues and the user is the one with the ultimate authority to direct action. This gives users a path to adopt autonomous operations gradually, where they can make certain functions autonomous if they want to or keep the human in the loop.

AI as the Dam Breaker for Many Advancements in Process Control

In many ways, AI is the “dam breaker” that is finally enabling us to do many of these things that we have been talking about for some time. This technology can also be applied to things like managing alarms and alerts and creating more effective operator logbooks, which can also be addressed with Experion Cognition. 

I’ve heard it said many times that the traditional role of the control room operator is long periods of inactivity punctuated by short bursts of frenetic activity when an abnormal situation happens. From a cognitive viewpoint, it’s similar to what firefighters have to face every day. The industry wants to move away from this mindset and put operators’ time to better use, especially with good operators being so hard to find. It’s time to move away from this mindset and focus on optimizing processes and production instead. This is the promise of AI-driven automation and autonomous operations.