At Innovation Summit 2025, Deepu Chawla, Senior Vice President, Industrial Control and Drives, Schneider Electric, Sophie Borgne, Water & Environment Segment President, Schneider Electric sat down with ARC’s Peter Manos to record an episode of ARC’s Digital Transformation Viewpoints. The three provide detailed examples of how industrial operators of all sizes across the globe are innovating at the intersection of energy and water resource optimization, electrification, and digital transformation. Listeners will learn how the replacement of carbon-heavy turbines with electrified "in a box" solutions improves heavy industry’s ability to meet net-zero targets. The discussion also emphasizes the rationale and value behind the inevitable shift from reactive to predictive maintenance, powered by IoT connectivity and open technologies. The importance of localized manufacturing and cybersecurity in securing critical infrastructure like water utilities is addressed. Ultimately, integrating hardware optimization with advanced digital services is presented as the essential path for modern operational resilience.

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In this podcast, ARC Advisory Group’s Craig Resnick and Schneider Electric’s Christina Volkringer explore the fundamentals of Software Defined Automation (SDA)—what it is, why the industry is ready for it, and how it transforms traditional control systems. They discuss how SDA shifts functionality from proprietary hardware to open, software-centric platforms, enabling virtualization, centralized orchestration, and flexible deployment across diverse environments.

The conversation also dives deep into Foxboro SDA’s differentiators, including vendor-agnostic openness, cybersecurity by design, and application-centric engineering that reduces costs and accelerates time-to-value. The podcast will address how Foxboro SDA supports IT/OT convergence, enables autonomous operations, and provides a clear modernization path that protects legacy investments while embracing future-ready architectures. Topics covered will include how SDA can drive resilience, scalability, and innovation in industrial automation.

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2024 was the year of "Generative AI Hype," AWS re:Invent 2025 was the moment the cloud officially got physical.

Fresh off the event in Las Vegas, Colin Masson, Director of Research for Industrial AI, ARC Advisory Group sat down with Steve Blackwell, Leader of the Worldwide Manufacturing Center of Excellence at AWS, to compare notes. He had just published ARC’s Top 10 Takeaways for Industrial AI, and Steve came prepared with his own list: the Top 7 Strategic Announcements that he believes will reshape the manufacturing landscape.

Colin's conversation zeroed in on the practical realities of deploying AI—from the "silicon to the edge." They discussed the massive potential of AWS Transform to pay down technical debt, the shift to "Frontier Agents" like Kiro, and the critical need for a new kind of talent through the Physical AI Fellowship.

You can listen to the full conversation Here on Buzzsprout or watch the video episode on the ARC Advisory Group YouTube Channel.

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The energy at AWS re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas was undeniable. The narrative has shifted decisively from the passive "Industrial Copilots" of last year to active, autonomous Agentic AI. Everywhere you looked, the talk was of autonomous swarms, "Supervisor Agents," and the new Strands Agents SDK empowering developers to build digital workers that can reason and act.

However, as I (Colin Masson of ARC Advisory Group) noted in my recent Top 10 Takeaways for Industrial AI from AWS re:Invent 2025, there is a stark divergence between the "hyperscaler dream" and the "brownfield reality." For manufacturers dealing with 20-year-old assets, proprietary protocols, and disparate silos, building these agents often hits a brick wall—the "Factory Wall." An AI agent is only as intelligent as the context it is fed, and in most factories, that context is trapped in the machine layer.

To explore how the industry is breaking through this barrier, I sat down at re:Invent with Joe Rosing, Worldwide Head of Smart Manufacturing at AWS, and Torey Penrod-Cambra, Co-Founder and Chief Communications Officer at HighByte. We discussed the critical role of Industrial DataOps in untangling the mess of industrial data to fuel the next generation of AI.

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It's impossible to ignore the tidal wave of excitement and hype surrounding Generative AI. However, at ARC Advisory Group, we consistently advise our Industrial Sector clients that success in this new era requires understanding the entire Industrial AI Toolbox, not just the newest, shiniest instrument. This ongoing Industrial AI (R)Evolution is fundamentally reshaping operations and architecture across IT, OT, ET, and Data Science domains.

To cut through the noise and provide clear guidance, I've been hosting a detailed podcast series on Industrial AI with thought leaders across the ecosystem. In this context, Colin Masson, Director of Research for Industrial AI was thrilled to welcome Dustin Johnson, CTO of Seeq Corporation, back for their third conversation.

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In our first ARC Advisory Group SPARC podcast, Steve Blackwell of AWS and I explored the vision for Software Defined Manufacturing, where Agentic AI acts as the "brain and central nervous system." Our second conversation brought that vision to the factory floor, examining the "muscles" of the operation with the rise of Physical and Embodied AI.

In this third installment of our ongoing dialogue, we connect the brain and the muscles. A central theme in my new ARC research series on the Voyage to Physical Intelligence is that for any system to perceive, reason, and act in the physical world, it needs a deep, contextual understanding of that world. This brings us to the critical role of the digital twin—not as a static model, but as a live, learning environment that serves as the foundation for the next wave of industrial autonomy.

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As manufacturers and processors globally navigate through an era marked by rapid technological advancements, trade and geopolitical uncertainties, and evolving consumer demands, the need for flexible, interoperable, and software-centric automation systems has never been more critical. Open software-defined automation is not just an incremental improvement; it's a strategic imperative that enables industries to enhance their competitiveness, operational resilience, efficiency, and sustainability. In this podcast, Craig Resnick, Vice President, from the ARC Advisory Group. and Hany Fouda, Senior Vice President, Process Automation, Industrial Automation Business, at Schneider Electric, will provide their insights on the transformative impact of open software-defined systems, explore the challenges faced by industry leaders, the role of Schneider Electric in driving this transformation, the benefits of adopting open software-defined automation, and real-life applications and future directions that affect industrial automation users globally.

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In our first ARC Advisory Group SPARC podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Steve Blackwell, Head of the Manufacturing Center of Excellence at Amazon Web Services (AWS), about the transformative shift towards Software Defined Manufacturing (SDM) in the Era of Agentic AI.1 We explored how Agentic AI is becoming the "brain and central nervous system" of the future factory, orchestrating complex digital workflows across the enterprise.2

In this second episode, we bring that vision down to the factory floor. We're moving from the digital intent to the physical action—from the brain to the "muscles" of the operation. Steve and I discuss the physical embodiment of SDM through robotics, exploring AWS's evolving strategy and the rise of a new, more capable class of automation: Physical and Embodied AI.

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