India's industrial moment: How AVEVA is turning data into the new competitive edge

As India's industrial sector charges toward its 2047 productivity vision, enterprises across the country are sitting on an uncomfortable reality. Billions are being poured into digital transformation, yet the vast majority of data being generated never translates into action. Information silos, disconnected systems, and the sheer complexity of industrial operations have left the promise of AI largely unrealised on the shop floor. With the window to get the data infrastructure right narrowing, the stakes for Indian industry have never been higher.

In an insightful conversation with Zubin Davar, VP of CONNECT Platform Sales & GTM, and Tarun Singh, VP Sales & India Market Leader at AVEVA, we explore how the company's industrial intelligence platform is looking to bridge that gap and why India sits at the very heart of that ambition.

Q1: Globally, enterprises are spending billions on digital transformation, yet many still struggle to see the ROI. What is the core bottleneck, and how is AVEVA addressing this?

Zubin Davar: For industrial enterprises globally, the challenge is not ambition but infrastructure. Despite heavy investments in digital transformation, up to 73% of all data collected within enterprises currently goes completely unused. Furthermore, 76% of business leaders report finding it difficult to understand their data. Industries are essentially drowning in dark data but starving for actionable insights, driven by information silos, inconsistent operations, and major barriers for remote and virtual teams. The promise of artificial intelligence remains largely unrealised for most industrial teams because operations data, engineering data, asset context, workflows, and compliance frameworks all need to be managed in one place without losing fidelity, lineage, or meaning. To manage these challenges, leaders must draw on disparate, often disconnected systems, which makes it incredibly difficult to gain a clear picture of performance.

CONNECT is our industrial intelligence platform designed to close this gap across every layer of deeply heterogeneous industrial technology stacks. By breaking down barriers of disconnected systems and culture, we champion connected ecosystems over traditional linear supply chains. Furthermore, across the CONNECT portfolio, we are announcing a series of updates to make high-fidelity operational data more accessible, scalable, and ready to support AI workloads at enterprise scale, via industrial-grade knowledge graphs and agentic-based digital twin builders. By lowering the cost and complexity of unifying industrial data, we help customers turn fragmented data into trusted intelligence, accelerating their AI-driven transformation safely and securely.

Q2: India is undergoing a massive industrial shift. How does the Indian market factor into AVEVA’s global platform strategy?
Tarun Singh: India is absolutely central to how we operate globally, not merely as a high-growth sales outpost, but as our most significant innovation and delivery hub globally. Currently, we have approximately 1,025 engineers based in India, contributing to 43% of AVEVA's global R&D capacity. The recent opening of our Customer Experience Centre in Hyderabad, one of only six worldwide – reflects the depth of our commitment to co-innovating directly with Indian enterprises. We are also actively growing our India R&D workforce by 5% annually, with a sharp focus on industrial agentic AI.

This investment aligns perfectly with India's macroeconomic momentum. The nation is at an inflection point, with the ''Make in India 2.0' roadmap and PLI schemes committing massive investments across sectors. Consequently, India's Industry 4.0 market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 24.5% through 2030, rising to nearly $28.5 billion. India's vision for 2047 places total factor productivity at the very centre of its growth agenda; the more productively Indian industries operate, the faster that vision is realised. This is where a definitive "Fusion Strategy" becomes critical. As the foundational thesis of Fusion Strategy notes, the very laws of competitive advantage are changing. Historically, the industrial world rewarded those who owned the most valuable physical assets. Today, competitive advantage belongs to those who possess the most robust, real-time, data-driven insights. Furthermore, India's vast MSME ecosystem represents a significant opportunity. By embedding AI and intelligence deeply into industrial workflows through CONNECT, we are democratising advanced industrial intelligence, making it accessible to enterprises of all sizes without requiring costly infrastructure overhauls, allowing them to operate with unprecedented confidence and scale.

Q3: We hear a lot about AI, but its application in heavy industries is complex. How is CONNECT bringing AI to the shop floor practically?
Zubin Davar: To make AI truly effective in heavy industries, it requires a rigorous operational context. Rather than feeding AI raw, disjointed OT and engineering data, we map the complex relationships between physical assets. That is why we are introducing a revolutionary industrial knowledge graph and a twin builder that applies agentic AI, slated for an Early Access Program opening this summer. By establishing a robust semantic model, this framework acts as the underlying architectural schematic that AI requires to deliver truly useful, accurate, and trusted outputs. Digital twins are evolving from static models into living, intelligent systems that integrate real-time analytics across entire industrial value chains. Generative and agentic AI are transforming the user experience: instead of learning how to make a complex tool work, operators simply ask for what they need, fundamentally lowering the expertise barrier.

On the shop floor, this translates into AI-driven anomaly detection, predictive throughput, predictive energy efficiency, and more. To support these data-heavy workloads, we are radically collaborating across the ecosystem. CONNECT’s native integrations with Databricks and Snowflake utilise a zero-copy architecture, allowing industrial enterprises to query high-fidelity OT data directly within Databricks or Snowflake without duplicating data, ensuring a single source of truth while dramatically lowering latency. Additionally, we are launching CONNECT Flows to enable the seamless assembly and deployment of data processing pipelines for real-time edge-to-cloud cleansing, filtering, and transformation. Taken together, these offer various pathways to bring OT data into customers’ broader architectures and take advantage of all AI has to offer.

Q4: Can you share examples of how this industrial intelligence is creating impact and fostering collaboration in India?
Tarun Singh: The momentum we are seeing is exceptional, driven largely by public-private alliances and a strong desire to integrate fragmented systems. In the context of a Fusion Strategy, this is about creating what experts call ‘tripartite twins’ - holistically linking the product twin (design), the process twin (manufacturing), and the performance twin (real-time field operations). CONNECT acts as the digital tissue that stitches these together. At the India CONNECT launch event in Mumbai, AVEVA announced the signing of Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with leading industry customers, including Deccan Fine Chemicals (I) Pvt. Limited, and Reliance Power Limited. These strategic agreements aim to accelerate the implementation of CONNECT, leveraging cloud capabilities to enable a secure, collaborative digital ecosystem across the value chain, driving exponential business growth.

Furthermore, to support the future digital workforce that will manage these autonomous systems, we also recently signed an MoU with VJTI’s Technology Business Incubator. This reinforces our commitment to academia-led skill development, supporting the creation of a future-ready talent pool to meet evolving industry needs.

Q5: Sustainability is now a board-level mandate. How does ecosystem data sharing on the CONNECT platform support ESG and decarbonisation goals?
Zubin Davar: True sustainability and comprehensive ESG compliance can no longer be achieved in a silo; they require a unified, AI-driven industrial ecosystem. The industrial sector accounts for a quarter of global emissions, but digital solutions have the potential to enable up to a 20% emissions reduction in energy-intensive sectors. While we have made strong commitments to reduce our own operational footprint, our biggest impact comes from our software "handprint" how we work with customers to enable them to drive efficiency, decarbonise operations, and support circularity. As sustainability and profitability become increasingly connected, by 2030, 50% of new economic value generated by digital businesses in the Asia/Pacific region will stem directly from organisations that are embedding data intelligence and scaling their artificial intelligence capabilities today.

CONNECT enables the secure exchange of OT, ET, and IT data beyond an organisation's four walls. This allows companies to securely share real-time ESG and operational data with partners, equipment manufacturers, and analytics providers. By sharing digital twins, organisations can mirror physical assets to model green what-if scenarios without disrupting current operations. Furthermore, applying AI for energy optimisation allows industries to actively minimise consumption and maximise efficiency. Our approach effectively decouples economic growth from carbon intensity, enabling customers to meet their Net Zero targets without sacrificing productivity. AVEVA's AI solutions have even been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), making us one of the first 50 companies globally to have net-zero targets fully aligned with climate science. Ultimately, we are proving that profitability and sustainability are two sides of the same coin.

Q6: Finally, what is your top advice for industrial leaders navigating this digital transformation over the next 2-3 years?
Tarun Singh: My primary advice to anyone starting their journey in industrial software or digital transformation is simple: before you build scale, build depth. The opportunities today are enormous, and the rapid pace of technological change makes it incredibly tempting to jump onto the latest technology trend and immediately try to build something on top of it. However, scale without depth rarely sustains. If you do not understand what the customer is doing, what their specific value chain looks like, and where the real impediments sit within their operations, there is simply no solid foundation from which to scale. Furthermore, I firmly believe that perfection can be delayed, but progress cannot be. Impact happens incrementally through consistent effort and deliberate action. Leaders must also recognise that they cannot achieve meaningful scale alone; you must empower your team, delegate with genuine confidence, and build teams that take true ownership.

Zubin Davar: I completely agree, and from a technology standpoint, that means driving a decisive shift from fragmented point solutions to integrated platforms. Fragmented IT and OT environments, alongside disconnected data, remain the single biggest inhibitor of operational efficiency at scale. Success in today's volatile environment requires breaking down barriers, championing connected ecosystems over traditional linear supply chains. We believe that to drive systemic change, we need concerted action from industries, governments, and technology leaders, an approach we call radical collaboration. Organisations that embrace this platform approach and aggregate their data ecosystems are already seeing 7+% more revenue growth than their industry peers. The digital backbone to achieve this safely is available today.

The road ahead for Indian industry is as demanding as it is promising. As enterprises navigate rising complexity, tightening sustainability mandates, and an AI landscape evolving faster than most transformation roadmaps can keep pace with, the ability to act on data - in real time, at scale, and with confidence, will increasingly separate leaders from laggards. For AVEVA, India is not a market to be served from afar; it is a strategic partner in building what industrial intelligence looks like next.