To help end-users see around corners and navigate today’s accelerating challenges, Emerson introduced its Project Beyond software-defined enterprise operations platform at this week’s Emerson Exchange 2025 conference in San Antonio. The new platform is designed to enable its industrial customers to add value to their operations by simplifying process automation, control and data management tasks.
“Our process industry community works daily to make much of modern life possible and improve it, so its members know they’re making a difference by developing innovations, and expanding the impact of automation and industrial software,” said Claudio Fayad, CTO of Emerson’s Aspen Technology business. “These innovations include working with DeltaV to enable sensors and instruments and take advantage of AI. We’re excited about these innovations because they’re born from our community, and they’re making the future of automation increasingly autonomous, simpler, safer and more sustainable.”
Fayad reported that Emerson is in a unique position to leverage its expertise to make these innovations happen and is introducing Project Beyond as their commitment to building an enterprise operations platform that’s software-defined and ready to enable operations technology. Project Beyond is designed to let existing solutions surpass what they can do presently, bridge their present and future capabilities, protect users’ investments, combine existing systems, and deliver actionable insights. It accomplishes these goals by combining and delivering value along six primary dimensions, including:
- Providing scalable computing power at the edge and in the cloud for greater scalability and flexibility, which enables processes to be managed quickly, securely and safely.
- Secure networking that brings together field devices, historians, optimization software and other OT tools, and seamlessly ties them to enterprise levels and IT architectures. This lets users bring all their automation assets into enterprise operations platforms.
- Unified data operations deliver a single source of truth for contextualized data and knowledge about users’ unique operations.
- Catalog of apps curated for the needs of users, which give them agility by combining available applications in one platform.
- AI orchestration allows users to access a range of industrial AI tools, which can assist in fulfilling the requirements of their process operations—reliably, safely and sustainably.
- Zero-trust security A new cybersecurity approach that goes beyond the usual perimeter protections and provides security for every network and connection within the Project Beyond platform.
“Project Beyond achieves its six dimensions by combining large-language models, AspenTech Aspen+ and HYSYS software, historical information and real-time data,” explained Fayad. “It integrates DeltaV control functionality and other Emerson software packages into AspenTech AVA software.” This AI-powered presence answers users’ probing questions to adjust operations for more optimal process performance and ultimately more autonomous operations.
For instance, Fayad demonstrated that users can ask AVA, “Why can’t I set the feed rate that I need?” and it will then respond with recommended adjustments. Users can also ask it, “What’s happening today?” and it will generate verbal reports.
“Project Beyond brings to life the vision of Boundless Automation that we introduced three years ago,” added Fayad. “It allows us to build new capabilities that let us accelerate optimization and add value by moving beyond what we could do before.”
