A Limble survey of 686 U.S. maintenance and operations professionals finds teams finish just 54% of scheduled preventive maintenance, and 47% of leaders report more than 10 hours of unplanned downtime in a typical month.
One agent checks photos of every tool and wire before and after a job. Hitachi reports up to 30% higher productivity, a vendor figure. The agents were built by the field crews who do the work.
Drivers cover Modbus, OPC UA, S7, EtherNet/IP, DNP3, IEC 61850 and more. An MCP gateway lets outside agents query devices with per-tool authorization.
For OT engineers: pull plant device data into one API and give an agent controlled access to it.
The authors describe AI that learns from past project schedules, drafts early schedule structures and helps planners test scenarios, with planners kept in the loop. They say the field is still early. Most companies already hold decades of old schedules that could inform the next project.