Emerson Exchange 2025 is off to a strong start. At the opening keynote, CEO Lal Karsanbhai and CTO for Emerson’s Aspen Technology business, Claudio Fayad, introduced a core component of this year’s gathering, the reveal of Emerson’s Project Beyond.
Project Beyond builds upon the foundation created with Emerson’s Boundless Automationsm initiative. Announced in 2022, Boundless Automation is Emerson’s answer to the rising challenges in industry that increase complexity and cost and stymie innovation. By building seamless data connectivity from the intelligent field, through the edge, and into the cloud, Boundless Automation is focused on breaking down the data silos that inhibit operational efficiency.
The announcement of Boundless Automation, Lal and Claudio shared, could not have been more fortuitous, as shortly thereafter the world experienced a paradigm shift in technology—the rise of AI. Suddenly, everyone around the globe began to see how AI technologies would begin to unlock operational efficiencies, sustainability increases, and performance capabilities the world had never dreamed of. But to do so, it would need to consume data at levels that were previously unheard of.
A new project for a new era of automation
To pave the way for the automation technologies of the future—which will depend on a much more efficient and effective convergence of OT and IT—Project Beyond will deliver the industry’s first software-defined, OT-ready digital platform that seamlessly integrates and optimizes industrial operations. That digital platform will bring a dramatic increase in compute power to the industrial edge.
Project Beyond will leverage innovations in software-defined control, data management, zero-trust cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, to help companies ensure their automation investments deliver value without adding complexity. But what is, perhaps, most exciting is that the enterprise operations platform that will emerge from Project Beyond will buck the trend of new technology innovations requiring plants to “rip-and-replace” their existing infrastructure. To the contrary, Project Beyond leverages technologies like DeltaV™ Revamp and DeltaV IO.Connect to ensure companies can protect their existing investments while still gaining the benefits of their new investments in automation.
A flexible, scalable architecture for innovation
Project Beyond relies not only on a seamless data fabric powered by Emerson’s AspenTech Inmation™, but also on a software-defined architecture to ensure it is the most flexible and scalable automation infrastructure available. Software-defined automation allows machine builders more options to specify the right hardware for the applications plants need to run. It will be easier to ensure hardware is in the right price range, with the right capacity by leveraging more flexible architecture. Ultimately, the software-defined controllers and edge devices that are part of Project Beyond’s platform will bring dramatically increased compute power closer to underlying manufacturing processes, unlocking the ability to drive competitive advantage in an increasingly complex and competitive global marketplace.
Project Beyond will also provide a consistent platform to deploy and manage new AI applications and models, along with contextualized data, to unlock unimagined flexibility, safety, sustainability, and performance.
All these technologies and more are on display at Emerson Exchange 2025 in San Antonio, where industry leaders come together to glimpse the future of automation. Stay tuned to the Emerson Automation Experts blog for more exciting news out of Exchange 2025.
