Unlocking the value of partner ecosystems in the AI era

Posted: March 11, 2025

Recent analysis from McKinsey shows close to fifty percent of business leaders are currently pursuing ecosystem strategies. By 2030, the integrated network economy could unlock a staggering $100 trillion in value. In the midst of changing markets, political upheaval, climate change, and increasing advancements in technology, the industrial partner ecosystem is a model that allows organizations to remain resilient. These partnerships can offset R&D costs, speed up time-to-market, and help companies reach new customers.

What is a partner ecosystem?

But what is a partner ecosystem? Forbes defines it as “a network of organizations that collaborate to create value for each other and their customers.”^[1] Partner ecosystems allow each partner to add value through their particular specialization while gaining the reach, knowledge, and skills of others.

Collaboration that transcends competitive and organizational silos

Take the microgrid, for example, which thrives on the partner ecosystem model. Due to the increasing volatility of storms and other natural disasters, large, centralized energy systems are becoming less feasible as a community’s only source of power. Localized microgrids that use renewable power from distributed energy resources (DERs) like solar panels and wind turbines can’t exist without utilities, asset operators, regulators, and communities working together. Some government agencies and organizations are taking this collaboration a step further, helping underserved or remote communities develop microgrid systems to make sure they can remain energy resilient.

As business needs change, tools and applications change, technology changes, and the healthy partner ecosystem allows organizations to remain flexible and make the most of their partners’ specializations. Industrial data is at the heart of these networks. As AVEVA CEO Caspar Herzberg writes, “Sharing information across organizations and disciplines means we can ask new questions—and generate new insights—that allow us to take on the really big challenges and opportunities facing industry.”

Sharing process data for the connected industrial economy

Harmony Gold depends on a partner network to manage equipment services and processes throughout its mine in Carletonville, South Africa. Harmony Gold’s mine is one of the world's deepest, extending nearly 5 kilometers underground. The mine captures process information across a vast array of systems and equipment—information about airflow, environmental and safety systems, water and compressed air for drills and other equipment—and it makes that data available to its partner network that helps manage these systems and this equipment. Using a unified and connected hybrid cloud data infrastructure, Harmony Gold enables its partners to create new value-added capabilities such as pump optimization and improvements in energy management and safety.

In a new initiative, the Mandela Mining Precinct, Harmony Gold is partnering with researchers, government agencies, and other mining companies to help make South Africa an example of mining excellence. Using its open, secure, neutral hybrid cloud platform, Harmony Gold can share its data anonymously for use in education and research.

This kind of partner ecosystem not only allows Harmony Gold to continue to optimize processes and remain competitive, but it also helps other mines meet ESG goals and ensures the sustainability of the industry overall.

Partner ecosystems and AI

Developments in AI are both helping to strengthen partner ecosystems and making them more necessary. Organizations using AI often require a wide range of AI tools they can adopt and customize for their specific business needs. As a recent report from the Harvard Business Review explains, successful implementors of AI “worked with a wider range of partners, and more intensively, in order to maximize speed and learning.” As AI continues to advance, the agnostic capacities of an organization’s technology stack will become increasingly vital to take advantage of resilient partner ecosystems.  

The Industrial AI Assistant: What is going on with that ship pump?

Microsoft is no stranger to partner ecosystems. Ninety-five percent of Microsoft’s commercial revenue comes through such partnerships. The company has been an AVEVA partner for over 30 years, and one of this partnership’s newest ventures is the Industrial AI Assistant. The Industrial AI Assistant runs on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and uses Microsoft Fabric and CONNECT, AVEVA’s industrial intelligence platform, to simplify the process of extracting insight from data.

With the Industrial AI Assistant, users can ask complex multi-step questions about systems, equipment, and processes and get answers that are backed up by references and citations. The Industrial AI Assistant combines LLM, gen AI, and industrial expertise, without using any proprietary information from the customer.

The user can ask the Industrial AI Assistant natural language questions about, say, a vessel pump after getting a notification through predictive analytics that something is wrong, and get information about what’s going on. The user can then ask for more information—about vibration or bearing temperatures, for example—and the assistant will provide those variables and point out any anomalies. And the information the assistant provides includes a transparent tracking of where that information came from and why it can be trusted. The user could then ask the assistant to pull up the maintenance manual for this pump and ask it to synthesize the information from the manual, or make suggestions about the cause of the problem and steps the operator might take to solve it.

Addressing the skills gap with AI

With rapid advancements every day in gen AI technology, this kind of application is only the beginning, but with its ease of use and low barrier of entry, the Industrial AI Assistant helps solve another challenge in many industries: the loss of skills as specialized workers retire. These AI tools can safeguard an organization’s collective wisdom as well as enable partners in the organization’s ecosystem to safely access and use necessary data and systems.

As we move toward an open, collaborative network model like the partner ecosystem, it remains more important than ever to have digital tools that are open and agnostic, allowing organizations to remain flexible and resilient.

Want to see the AVEVA Industrial AI Assistant in action? AVEVA Chief Product Officer Rob McGreevy demos the AI tool in his 2024 AVEVA World presentation.

^{[1] Forbes Business Council. (October 30, 2024). Four key elements to building a winning partner ecosystem. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2024/10/30/four-key-elements-to-building-a-winning-partner-ecosystem/}