Sheila Jordan is such a big fan of generative artificial intelligence that she has already made it available to all 95,000 employees at Honeywell.
“There is no function in the company that is not thinking about artificial intelligence,” says Jordan, senior vice president and chief digital technology officer at Honeywell since 2020, after long leadership roles at Symantec, Cisco and Walt Disney Co.
While Jordan acknowledges that there is an ongoing debate between those who have bought into the hype around generative AI and those who aren’t yet convinced by the technology, she is such a passionate believer in the technology that Honeywell has already put 16 use cases for generative AI into production. To generate excitement internally, Honeywell employees can submit ideas for how to use the technology, and hundreds of proposals have already been submitted.
But Jordan is also keen to remain fiscally responsible when considering when to use generative AI. She prioritizes the biggest, most impactful ideas first, those that can drive revenue, Thrust To increase productivity or increase employee job satisfaction.
Generative AI has reached Honeywell in a variety of ways. Some of the earliest use cases stem from the company’s relationship with Microsoft, which Honeywell relies on for its Azure cloud computing services. About 5,300 Honeywell employees have access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, and over 4,500 software developers use GitHub to write 90,000 lines of code per week. Engineers find the productivity gains attractive, with Honeywell reporting a 65% usage rate for GitHub.
Honeywell has also introduced some tools, including an AI copilot offering from Moveworks, to automate some IT help desk requests. The number of incoming tickets has dropped by 80% because virtual assistants can handle much of the workload and only the most complex issues need to be handled by the human IT help desk.
Honeywell has also introduced a generative AI virtual assistant called Red that can quickly pull data from the company’s archive, including 350,000 pages of product manuals and over 50,000 internally created articles. Red provides answers in more than 100 languages and is accessible to any employee with a laptop.
Jordan says one of the biggest problems facing companies like Honeywell today is that they are swimming in too much data that isn’t always properly organized. Generative AI can organize that data, including unstructured data from video or Word documents, for better insights that “give you a whole new perspective on what’s happening in your business,” Jordan says.
Her efforts to discover data stored at Honeywell began before the generative AI boom, but were timely given the importance of data to the proper functioning of generative AI. Four years ago, Jordan began reducing the number of software applications used at Honeywell. When certain vendors, such as Salesforce or SAP, are selected, that solution is deployed across the entire company.
As a result, Honeywell now has just over 1,000 software applications in use, significantly fewer than the 4,500 when Jordan came on board.
Honeywell now uses Snowflake for all important and critical data, including bookings, invoices, inventory, HR and engineering data. The data-driven approach allows Honeywell to make faster decisions, make more accurate predictions and even become more inventive with dynamic pricing. These are tactics that allow companies like Honeywell to charge higher prices when they take into account factors like regional preferences, seasonality and spikes in demand.
“You can’t have a strategy for all of AI without a data strategy,” says Jordan.
In addition to working with Microsoft, Honeywell is also exploring generative AI tools from AWS and has had discussions with Google and others. “I actually think the technology is not as important as the usage,” says Jordan, who believes all the major players will deliver great AI technologies.
However, Jordan doesn’t want Honeywell to use a multitude of large language models because it would make it difficult to comply with the company’s responsible AI governance and security principles. “When you have too much technology, it can become difficult to manage,” Jordan says.
And although a recent Honeywell survey found that only 17% of AI decision makers in the industrial sector have fully implemented their original plans for the technology, Jordan says she’s been in the tech industry long enough to remember the days when companies had concerns about allowing employees to use their personal phones for business purposes. They eventually solved that problem and will do so again with generative AI.
“You’re not going to get everything right,” says Jordan. “Find the best use case and keep using it. Because it’s not going away.”
John Kell
Send your thoughts or suggestions to CIO Intelligence here.
NEWS PACKAGES
27% of Fortune 500 companies view AI regulation as a risk. The lack of comprehensive federal regulations on AI, a patchwork of laws currently working their way through the U.S. federal legislatures, and the recently enacted European Union AI Act have led to an estimated 27% of Fortune 500 companies citing AI regulation as a risk in recent filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The biggest concerns includeHe Wall Street Journal Reportsinclude the cost of complying with AI regulation, the inability to predict what the regulation will look like, and the level of penalties companies face if their AI use violates regulation. Yet surveys consistently show that companies are moving full steam ahead on their AI initiatives, despite hundreds of AI regulatory bills sitting in state legislatures, including around 30 bills in California alone.
IBM is cutting jobs in China while Western companies continue to withdraw. IBM cuts more than 1,000 jobs in China, CNN Reportsthe latest indication that geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington are having an impact on the future of the technology industry in the world’s second-largest economy. CNN reports that some companies, including Microsoft, have either laid off or relocated employees for national security reasons. Market opportunities for enterprise IT in particular have worsened, partly due to a preference to pour more money into state-owned companies and also due to the shift in money to hybrid cloud and AI technologies.
Cerebras competes against Nvidia with a new AI processor. Nvidia’s massive market share in the AI chip market continues to attract competitors seeking to undermine its dominance. The latest challenge comes from Sunnyvale, California-based startup Cerebras Systems, a startup that this week introduced a new chip It claims it will “outperform” the competition at running AI models and generating answers (known as “inference” in AI jargon). The chip will be offered as part of computer systems that companies can buy and run on-premises, or use as a pay-as-you-go cloud service operated by Cerebras. At an event in San Francisco this week, Cerebras founder and CEO Andrew Feldman predicted the new chips will take enough market share away from Nvidia to “sour” them.
ACCEPTANCE CURVE
The industrial sector is using AI but is often asked to justify the expenditure. Honeywell’s recent survey found that Nearly two-thirds of AI executives cite efficiency and productivity gains as the most promising benefits of AI technologies. Improving cybersecurity came in second, followed by better decision-making through the generation of real-time data, according to responses from 1,600 industry executives worldwide conducted by Wakefield Research.
Benefits of AI that were ranked lower include greater job flexibility, higher job satisfaction, and more time for creative thinking.
However, the survey also found that nearly half of respondents (48%) say they constantly have to justify the resources they need to support AI implementation. This could be short-sighted, says Jordan Assets that the industry has not yet realized the full potential of AI to better plan, source, manufacture and ship goods to customers. “The AI of the next generation is able to take that data and look at the entire end-to-end system,” says Jordan.
JOBS-RADAR
Attitude:
– Arc Institute Is looking for an IT managerbased in Palo Alto, California. Posted salary range: $208,400-$257,500/year.
– Kidango Is looking for a VP of ITbased in Fremont, California. Posted salary: $230,400/year.
Rented:
– Adyen announced that Tom Adams will join the Dutch payments company as CTO, succeeding Alexander Matthey, whose term ends at the end of 2024. Adams comes to Adyen from Cash App, where he served as Chief Technology Officer for four years.
– Horizon Aircraft appointed Tom Brassington as CTO is the latest in a series of new hires as the aerospace manufacturer looks to strengthen its engineering team for hybrid-electric aircraft development. Brassington joins Horizon from Lilium, where he served as head of system design development.
– Growing called Kristi Jurecka as CTO and Brooke Huling as Chief Product Officer, with the roles of Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer being split as their predecessor Richard Leurig was promoted to President of the software company. As CTO, Jurecka will oversee product development and engineering operations.
– Careington International announced the appointment of Anthony Mustoe as CIO. Mustoe has 25 years of experience in IT leadership in the healthcare, biotechnology and telecommunications sectors, most recently as CIO at clinical diagnostics company SomaLogic.
