Rockwell Automation is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft to boost customers’ industrial transformation. The two companies plan to provide manufacturing customers with cloud and AI solutions for data insights, streamlining operations and enhancing scalability.

Microsoft’s Azure IoT Operations has been integrated with Rockwell’s digital offerings, including FactoryTalk Optix. This combined solution is designed to allow manufacturers and production companies to capture critical insights from existing sites without extensive retrofitting. The adaptive cloud approach will simplify integration of shop-floor data with cloud-based applications, enabling analytics and improving scalability across multi-site environments. By employing this integration, customers can gain actionable insights to optimise production and drive data-informed decisions across their operations.

Rockwell has expanded its FactoryTalk Design Studio software-as-a-service design software with a new Generative AI Copilot, developed in partnership with Microsoft. The latest feature, supported by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, enables engineers to use natural language prompts for tasks like product guidance, code generation, troubleshooting and code explanations, making system design faster and more intuitive. FactoryTalk Design Studio is designed to provide a collaborative, multi-user environment with integrated version control.

The collaboration will also introduce Rockwell’s FT Optix Food & Beverage model, enabled through Rockwell’s digital and service offerings, into the Microsoft AI model catalogue, The model brings AI and Generative AI (GenAI) directly to the manufacturing floor. The adapted AI model, which employs Microsoft’s Phi-3 small language models (SLM), will provide machine operators with AI-guided instructions, assisting in process and device operations via the FactoryTalk Optix interface. With specifically trained models, workers can access contextualised AI guidance to enhance productivity, reduce errors, and accelerate decision-making.

“We are thrilled to continue our work with Rockwell Automation to help customers accelerate their industrial transformation journey,” said Kam VedBrat, General Manager, Azure IoT, Microsoft. “By combining Rockwell’s industry-leading automation solutions with Microsoft Azure IoT Operations, and through our collaboration on an adapted AI model based on Phi-3, we are enabling customers to unlock new levels of efficiency and innovation.”

“We are excited to strengthen our partnership with Microsoft as we work to meet the evolving challenges faced by today’s manufacturers,” said Jessica Korpela, director, global customer innovation at Rockwell Automation. “This enhanced collaboration fuses cloud and AI technologies with our extensive expertise in industrial automation, enabling our customers to reach unprecedented levels of efficiency, innovation and resilience in their operations.”