If you’re waiting for perfect conditions, you’re already falling behind. That’s the message Ram Krishnan, COO, Emerson, reiterated as he addressed attendees of the closing session of Emerson Exchange 2025 in the Lila Cockrell Theatre at the Henry B. González Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas, on May 22. Of course, perfect conditions rarely, if ever, exist in process manufacturing or in industrial automation, but he noted that by their mere presence at this year’s Exchange, those in attendance showed a willingness to move forward despite the challenges.
“What stood out this week is how aligned we all are in wanting to do more,” he told the audience of 2,800 process automation professionals. “You have operations in your respective companies that are complex and work in a world that is always in motion, and yet you keep pushing for progress.”
Attendees at Emerson Exchange 2025 represented multiple industrial sectors, yet they all came in search of ways to achieve the same things: bigger goals, smarter operations, and greater impact on their operations. Krishnan stressed the importance of collaboration during the weeklong event, stressing it goes beyond software and hardware, and focuses the efforts of the people behind the technology. Accelerating innovation isn’t about adding modern technologies, but how industry aligns, adapts, and moves forward together, making the meaningful use of investments already made and new ones to come. “From many sessions, one-on-one conversations and hallway discussions, I have seen a focus and commitment to collaborating and moving forward, regardless of what stands in our path,” Krishnan said.
He added that Boundless Automation, originally launched in 2022 as Emerson’s vision for an industrial automation platform that integrates operations across the intelligent field, edge, and cloud to empower enterprise-wide optimization and automation, represents a fundamental shift in how the company approaches industrial automation. It involves moving beyond control-centric systems to a more open and modular, software-defined, data-centric approach. It unlocks data that has been stuck in operational silos, and enables information to flow freely across production, reliability, safety and sustainability domains.
The heart of Boundless Automation is a communication backbone and infrastructure that turns fragmented, inaccessible data into shared contextualized intelligence, Krishnan emphasized. It connects intelligent field control systems at the edge and software applications in the cloud to a single source of information, giving operations teams the context they need to act with speed and confidence.
Beyond boundless
The ultimate prize, he said, is a unified system that can adapt to change, optimize in real-time and scale toward automated control systems. “Boundless Automation is not only a direction that makes sense, but also a shift that is long overdue in our industry,” he said. This week, Emerson introduced Project Beyond, which sparked optimism for seamless sensing, control and optimization capabilities. “Many of you told us [this week] that this is the platform you’ve been waiting for,” Krishnan said.
Project Beyond is a seamlessly integrated platform that enables industrial automation in a way that aligns with how people work and where the industry is headed. Krishnan said it marks a true evolution of the distributed control system from an on-site, traditional production control system to an enterprise-wide, software-defined data center architecture that lets information move seamlessly across all the core functions so performance can be optimized holistically and not in isolation. “We know what has been holding you back—the pain of working with data that lacks context, integrating new tools across legacy systems, and the cost of supporting isolated applications.”
Project Beyond is intended to remove those barriers with out-of-the-box connectivity, intuitive interfaces and scalability that are adaptable as the industry evolves. To do so, software-defined capability is needed, and that’s where Emerson’s recent acquisition of AspenTech comes into play.
The right direction
Krishnan was joined on the stage by Claudio Fayad, CTO, of Emerson’s Aspen Technology business, and Peter Zornio, CTO, Emerson, for a look at key takeaways from the week of Emerson Exchange 2025. Fayad noted the positive reception for the concept of software-defined automation. Zornio agreed, but added that there’s still a need for a robust platform to execute it. Robust hardware, he added, is the foundation for the edge and for the future of industrial automation.
Overall, both executives were encouraged by the response from attendees to Project Beyond. “I saw a lot that reinforced to me that we're headed in the right direction,” Zornio said.
Krishnan wondered if AI was as pervasive on people’s minds as most think it is. “We are excited about AI. It demonstrates that investments will go beyond what we are doing today,” Fayad said. “It’s a good example of how AspenTech and Emerson have come together. No doubt that AI will be extremely helpful in our industry.”
Zornio added that reliability solutions have the opportunity to benefit from AI, which promises a step change in performance if you have the right infrastructure to deploy it. Both executives agreed that we’ve reached a point where everyone is looking to use AI in every area of their operation. But to get there, they need a unified data fabric to serve as a fundamental base for AI strategy. “It’s critical,” Zornio said.
Achieving autonomous operations
All three executives pondered the ultimate goal of autonomous operations. They said companies can’t have an autonomous plan unless they first have great core control, which must go beyond steady state. They must be able to use AI to protect and provide corrective action instructions before faults lead to downtime.
Modern computing technologies solving the OT data integration problem, complemented with industrial AI applications, can deliver a more dependable, profitable, safe, and sustainable plant and enterprise, they said.
As he ended the session, Krishnan told the audience, “The future of industrial automation isn't being handed down from the top. It is being built brick-by-brick. This is why we are focused on breaking down the silos that limited industrial automation for decades.”
Now, the future of industrial automation is becoming a reality.
