Que: India is rapidly expanding renewable energy while modernising its power infrastructure. From AVEVA's perspective, what are the biggest digital transformation challenges utilities and industrial companies face in managing this transition?

Ans: Ann Moore: From AVEVA’s perspective, the biggest digital transformation challenge is ensuring that the grid can keep pace with the country’s rapid expansion of renewable energy and electrification. As solar and wind capacity grows, utilities are managing more variable generation alongside rising electricity demand from data centres, industrial electrification and electric mobility. At the same time, initiatives such as PM-KUSUM are contributing to a more distributed and dynamic energy system, making real-time visibility and coordination across the grid increasingly important.

This means India’s utilities need to move beyond traditional, largely one-way grid operations towards more connected and data-driven systems. Bringing together operational, engineering and asset data can give utilities greater visibility into renewable generation, demand patterns and asset performance, helping them forecast more accurately, manage variability and make better use of existing grid infrastructure. Digital technologies such as industrial AI, predictive analytics and digital twins can support this shift by enabling more predictive maintenance, optimising asset performance and helping reduce renewable energy curtailment.

For India, the opportunity is not simply to build more generation or grid infrastructure, but to make the existing network more intelligent and responsive. A stronger digital foundation can help utilities balance increasingly dynamic power flows, integrate distributed energy resources and improve reliability as electricity demand continues to grow. This will be an important enabler of India’s energy transition, particularly as the country works towards a more flexible, resilient and digitally connected power system.

Que: Having recently taken over as Country Head for India, what are your immediate priorities, and how does India fit into AVEVA's global growth strategy?

Ans: Tarun Singh: As I take on the role of Country Head for India, my immediate priorities are centred around scale, relevance and impact. India is going through a significant phase of industrial transformation, with government investment in infrastructure, utilities and energy, alongside the country’s ambition to build a stronger, more self-reliant industrial economy. For AVEVA, this creates an opportunity to expand our footprint and deepen our engagement across areas such as manufacturing, energy transition and smart infrastructure.

Relevance is equally important. India’s industrial landscape is evolving rapidly, and the needs of customers today are different from even a few years ago. Our focus is therefore on ensuring that AVEVA’s portfolio, go-to-market approach and partner ecosystem remain closely aligned with these changing requirements. India’s long-term growth ambitions also place greater emphasis on productivity, and this is an area where industrial intelligence can play an important role in helping organisations improve efficiency and make better use of their resources.

Our Customer Experience Centre in Hyderabad is an important part of this commitment, giving us a platform to work more closely with customers and partners, demonstrate our capabilities and support collaboration and innovation from India. It also reinforces India’s role within AVEVA’s broader global ecosystem.

Ultimately, this needs to translate into measurable impact for our customers and for the country. That is the lens through which we will look at our growth in India. From a global perspective, India is an important part of AVEVA’s growth strategy. Globally, we are focused on accelerating the adoption of industrial intelligence by bringing together AI, digital twins and connected data to help organisations move beyond point solutions towards more integrated platforms. India gives us an important market in which to apply this approach at scale, while also contributing to AVEVA’s broader global innovation and growth agenda.

Que: How are utilities using predictive analytics and AI to improve asset reliability, reduce outages, and optimise maintenance schedules?

Ans: Ann Moore: Utilities are increasingly using predictive analytics and AI to shift from reactive or time-based maintenance towards condition-based and predictive operations that improve asset reliability and strengthen grid resilience. By combining real-time sensor data with Industrial AI and connected data platforms, utilities can continuously monitor the health of critical assets, identify subtle equipment anomalies before they escalate into failures, and forecast maintenance needs more accurately.

This enables maintenance teams to intervene proactively, reducing unplanned outages, extending asset life and optimising maintenance schedules while avoiding unnecessary servicing. A notable example is Tata Power, which uses AVEVA Predictive Analytics to continuously monitor the health and performance of critical power-generation assets, providing early warnings of potential equipment problems and supporting proactive maintenance. Tata Power’s centralised Remote Monitoring and Diagnostics Center also uses predictive analytics to monitor generation and transmission assets and identify early signs of equipment degradation.

The broader opportunity is to move from responding to equipment failures towards anticipating them. This can help utilities improve asset reliability, extend asset life and make better use of existing infrastructure as they manage increasingly dynamic power systems.

Que: Utilities increasingly require real-time visibility across distributed energy resources. How is AVEVA helping customers manage increasingly decentralised power systems?

Ans: Ann Moore: As power systems become more decentralised with the rapid adoption of distributed energy resources (DERs), battery storage, renewable generation and two-way power flows, utilities need greater visibility across their networks to maintain reliability and optimise performance.

AVEVA helps address this challenge through its industrial intelligence platform CONNECT, which provides a connected view of operations, helping utilities understand changing network conditions, monitor distributed assets and coordinate increasingly complex power flows. Advanced analytics can help utilities improve forecasting and assess different operating scenarios as the grid becomes more dynamic.

A practical example is Adani Power, which has used AVEVA PI System to create a centralised scheduling and monitoring system and enable more consolidated visibility across its thermal plants, supporting faster, data-centric decision-making from a central view of operations. As utilities expand renewables and integrate DERs, the same principle applies - utilities need a trusted, real-time operational picture that can scale from individual assets to the broader network.
This visibility becomes increasingly important as utilities integrate more intermittent renewable generation and distributed resources across the network. Together, these capabilities can help utilities integrate distributed resources more effectively while maintaining a more flexible and responsive grid.

Que: How does AVEVA's CONNECT ecosystem enable organisations to improve operational efficiency while maintaining cybersecurity and data integrity?

Ans: Tarun Singh: CONNECT helps organisations improve operational efficiency by creating a secure, unified digital environment where information and real-time data from across assets, systems and teams can be integrated, contextualised and shared. Organisations are then able to break down data silos, create a more consistent view of their operations and make faster, more informed decisions that improve asset performance, reliability and productivity.

CONNECT also enables collaboration across the enterprise and with external stakeholders, helping organisations bring information together across their wider industrial ecosystem. This is particularly important as utilities and industrial companies increasingly need to integrate data from diverse assets, applications and operational environments.

Security is embedded into this approach through a secure-by-design methodology, supported by robust governance and resilient digital architectures. By combining trusted data and secure digital foundations with advanced analytics and AI, CONNECT enables organisations to pursue digital transformation while maintaining the security, integrity and resilience of their industrial operations.

Que: Which sectors in India have the greatest untapped potential to improve sustainability through industrial digitalisation?

Ans: Tarun Singh: India’s biggest untapped sustainability opportunity is in energy- and resource-intensive systems, where small efficiency gains translate into large emissions and cost reductions at scale. That includes power and utilities, energy-intensive manufacturing (metals, cement, chemicals, pharma, and automotive supply chains), water and wastewater, and urban infrastructure such as smart cities, transport and public utilities.

Across these sectors, industrial digitalisation helps organisations shift from periodic reporting to continuous operational optimisation. That means identifying losses in real time, reducing energy intensity, improving asset reliability, and optimising throughput and quality with less waste.

In practical terms, the highest-impact use cases are often very operational: energy management and demand optimisation, predictive maintenance to reduce unplanned downtime and inefficient running, process optimisation to cut fuel and raw-material use, and fleet or network-level visibility that enables better coordination across distributed assets.

We see strong momentum in India as operators move beyond pilots toward scaling these capabilities across multiple sites and networks. AVEVA’s work with organisations such as Adani Power, Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation, and the Government of Maharashtra reflects how building a trusted, connected data foundation can deliver both operational efficiency and measurable sustainability outcomes—supporting India’s broader goals around decarbonisation, resilience and infrastructure modernisation.

Que: As utilities become more connected, cybersecurity risks also increase. How should organisations balance digital transformation with operational resilience and cyber preparedness?

Ans: Ann Moore: As utilities become more connected and data-driven, cybersecurity must be embedded into every stage of digital transformation rather than treated as a standalone IT function. The convergence of operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT), coupled with increasing connectivity across distributed energy resources, is expanding the potential attack surface and making cyber resilience a critical requirement for modern utilities.

AVEVA advocates a secure-by-design approach that combines real-time operational visibility with robust governance, continuous monitoring and resilient digital architectures. Bringing operational data together in a trusted environment can also strengthen situational awareness, helping organisations identify anomalies earlier and respond more effectively to potential disruptions while maintaining reliable operations.

The objective is to build security and resilience into the digital foundation from the outset, rather than adding cybersecurity measures after deployment. This enables utilities to accelerate digitalisation and the energy transition while maintaining the security, reliability and resilience of critical infrastructure.