Industrial AI & efficiency - data reports
In-depth 'state of' reports on the technologies reshaping heavy industry - predictive maintenance, energy efficiency, automation and more. Each pulls together the public numbers with charts, original analysis and cited sources.
State of Predictive Maintenance 2026
Predictive maintenance has moved from pilot projects to budgeted, scaled deployment. The market is growing near 30% a year, AI ado…
State of Industrial Energy Efficiency 2026
Energy efficiency is the cheapest, fastest tonne of carbon a plant can save — and the numbers show it scaling. Global efficiency i…
State of Manufacturing Decarbonisation 2026
Industry is roughly a quarter of global energy-related emissions, and most of that comes from a handful of hard-to-abate processes…
State of Computer Vision Quality Control 2026
Automated visual inspection has quietly become one of the most reliable returns in the factory. Cameras paired with deep-learning …
State of Industrial Energy Management 2026
Managing energy actively — metering it, controlling it, and shifting it in time — is becoming standard practice rather than a sust…
State of AI in Food & Beverage Manufacturing 2026
Artificial intelligence in food and beverage manufacturing has shifted from novelty to operating tool — used for quality inspectio…
State of AI in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing 2026
In pharmaceutical manufacturing, AI's clearest near-term value is not drug discovery but quality and operations — where deviations…
State of AI in the Chemical Industry 2026
The chemical industry is the largest industrial energy consumer on the planet, which makes process optimisation the natural home f…
State of Industrial Automation & Robotics 2026
Factory automation has stopped being a story about a handful of car plants. Annual robot installations have topped half a million …
State of Industrial IoT & Connectivity 2026
The connected factory is no longer aspirational — the number of connected devices crossed 21 billion in 2025, the industrial slice…
State of Digital Twins in Manufacturing 2026
Digital twins have crossed from concept demos into mainstream advanced-industry practice. Adoption among advanced-industry firms i…
State of Industrial Heat Recovery & Reuse 2026
Industry throws away a startling share of the energy it buys — between a fifth and a half of every fuel input leaves the plant as …
State of Compressed Air Efficiency 2026
Compressed air is often called the fourth utility, and it is also one of the most wasteful. It consumes around a tenth of all indu…
State of Industrial Electrification 2026
Swapping fuel for electricity is the central decarbonisation move for the part of industry that does not need extreme heat — and t…
State of Steel Decarbonisation 2026
Steel is the single largest industrial source of carbon dioxide, responsible for somewhere between 7% and 9% of global emissions. …
State of Cement & Concrete Decarbonisation 2026
Concrete is the most-used material on the planet after water, and the cement that binds it accounts for roughly 7–8% of global CO2…
State of ESG & Sustainability Reporting in Industry 2026
Sustainability reporting has become standard practice for the world's largest companies, even as the regulation behind it is being…
State of Green Hydrogen in Industry 2026
Green hydrogen has been promised as the clean fuel for the parts of industry that electricity cannot reach — high-temperature heat…
State of Carbon Capture, Utilisation & Storage 2026
Carbon capture is the lever the hard-to-abate sectors lean on for the emissions that efficiency and electrification cannot remove …
State of the Circular Economy in Manufacturing 2026
The circular economy promises to break the link between making things and consuming new raw material — designing out waste, keepin…
State of Industrial Water & Wastewater Management 2026
Industry takes about a fifth of the world's freshwater and returns much of it dirtier than it found it — yet most wastewater globa…
State of AI in Mining 2026
Mining is one of the most physically demanding, capital-heavy and safety-critical of all industries, which makes it fertile ground…
State of Industrial Supply Chain & Logistics AI 2026
Supply chains learned the hard way over recent years that visibility and resilience are worth paying for, and AI is now the main t…
State of AI Adoption in European Manufacturing 2026
Artificial-intelligence use across European businesses is no longer marginal: official Eurostat surveys show enterprise adoption r…
State of European Industrial Energy & Decarbonization 2026
European industry runs increasingly on electricity, and the electricity feeding it is getting cleaner. Eurostat data show industry…
State of EU Manufacturing: Enterprises & Resilience 2026
Behind the EU's industrial output sits a vast population of firms. Eurostat business-demography data show more than 33 million ent…
What Machine Learning on 42,000 Power Plants Reveals
We built an open, machine-readable dataset of 42,000+ power stations — per-plant CO₂, fuel, climate zone and ISO 9223 atmospheric-…
AI for Industrial Energy Efficiency: Where the Heat Goes
AI in heavy industry is mostly framed around uptime and quality — but one of the largest, least-glamorous prizes is thermal energy…
AI Data-Center Power Crisis 2026
AI is turning data centres into a power-system issue. The practical question for industry is no longer whether AI workloads grow; …
Agentic AI in Manufacturing 2026
Agentic AI in manufacturing moves beyond a dashboard: it can gather evidence, plan bounded steps, draft work and request approval.…
Digital Twins in Manufacturing: 2026 Update
A useful manufacturing digital twin is an operating data model, not a 3D illustration. It connects asset identity, live state, eng…
Multimodal Predictive Maintenance 2026
Multimodal predictive maintenance combines signals that describe different failure mechanisms: vibration, thermography, electrical…
AI water consumption: what the numbers measure
Eleven source-linked water figures: distinguish prompt statistics, modelled training, corporate withdrawal and replenishment befor…
AI in Biologics Manufacturing 2026: Plasma and Cell Therapy Compared
Plasma fractionation and cell therapy both get called biologics manufacturing, and in a plant they have almost nothing in common. …
NIST supply chain traceability for manufacturers
NIST IR 8536 gives manufacturers a technology-neutral way to link and verify product provenance. This report shows what that means…
How much AI can a power station support?
A worked 500 MW power station scenario: how PUE, available power and flexible demand change AI data centre capacity. Includes char…
Humanoid robots enter production
A humanoid robot production line and a robotics capability framework were announced in September 2026. What physical AI requires, …
Autonomous AI cyberattacks and manufacturers
A September 2026 threat report documents intrusions in which AI agents performed nearly all the technical work. What that changes …
The 2 GW AI factory
What a gigawatt capacity announcement actually states, where the electricity goes, why liquid cooling decides whether heat can be …
Agentic AI in predictive maintenance
Maintenance software is moving from raising alerts to proposing a diagnosis across repeated failures. What separates alerting, dia…
Industrial-scale AI model distillation
A joint US advisory describes systematic extraction of frontier model capabilities through queries. What separates legitimate dist…
The gas fleet behind AI demand forecasts is already old
Of the 2,116.2 GW of gas capacity that carries a commissioning date, 775.7 GW is at least 25 years old. The United States holds 28…
What is actually in the power build pipeline
473 stations carry a commissioning date later than 2026, 523.7 GW in total. Gas is 321.1 GW of it, against 775.7 GW of gas already…
The heat-recovery fleet that AI load will lean on is past twenty
2,783 stations are recorded with heat-recovery steam generators, 2,100.6 GW. Of the 1,600.5 GW carrying a date, 840.5 GW has been …
The environment the grid AI runs on has to survive
42,094 stations scored, 10,679.7 GW. 3,669 stations and 1,800.6 GW fall in the two highest exposure classes, all of them coastal s…
Counting factories tells you almost nothing about emissions
Across 30,533 mapped industrial facilities, food and beverage and textiles are 71.1% of the sites and 1.6% of the estimated emissi…
How much water and electricity does one AI prompt actually use?
Google measured its median Gemini text prompt at 0.24 Wh and 0.26 mL of water, counting cooling inside the data centre. Counting t…
Will AI take your job? What the payroll data shows so far
Payroll records for about 4.6 million United States workers show no widespread displacement, but employment of 22 to 25 year olds …
Is AI a bubble? Do the arithmetic yourself
One frontier developer went from $9bn to $19bn annualised revenue in about three months. At $600bn of annual capital spending over…
Why AI agents fail
On a benchmark of 175 consequential office tasks, the strongest agent completed 30.3% autonomously and the weakest 1.7%. Some agen…
Do AI detectors work?
Turnitin claimed a false-positive rate under 1%. Vanderbilt calculated that meant about 750 of its 75,000 annual papers wrongly fl…
Will AI replace software engineers?
A randomised controlled trial found experienced developers took 19% longer with AI tools while estimating they had been 20% faster…
Will AI replace accountants, lawyers and doctors?
Payroll data names customer service representatives, software developers, accountants and receptionists as the most AI-exposed occ…
Is AI conscious?
Researchers derived indicator properties from the leading neuroscientific theories of consciousness and checked AI architectures a…
Can AI art be copyrighted?
United States copyright requires a human author. The Copyright Office holds that prompts alone do not provide enough control for h…
What is AI slop?
Macquarie Dictionary made AI slop its 2025 word of the year, defining it as low-quality content created by generative AI, often co…
Is AI making us dumber?
In an MIT Media Lab study, participants writing essays with a language model showed the weakest neural connectivity of three group…
AI scams: what the loss figures actually show
Americans reported $893m lost to AI-enabled fraud across 22,364 complaints in 2025. One firm lost $25m in fifteen transfers after …
Can AI cure cancer?
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to protein structure prediction and design, and around 200 million structures were solved. …
Is ChatGPT safe for confidential information?
OpenAI states it does not train on Business, Enterprise, Edu, Healthcare, Teachers or API data by default, while naming consumer C…
How to spot AI content
Artefact-spotting fails because defects get engineered out each generation, and text detectors are biased against non-native Engli…
When Data Centre Waste Heat Can Actually Be Used
Data centre heat reuse is not decided by a headline temperature alone. The source, the receiving network, year-round demand and th…