Honeywell Technologies has introduced Forge Cognition, a self-contained agentic AI and simulation platform for facility operations developed with technology from NVIDIA and Dell Technologies. Designed to improve building automation and industrial operations for complex facilities, Forge Cognition combines real-time digital twins with AI agents to help operators understand facility conditions, simulate operating scenarios and autonomously coordinate actions across supported existing systems.
The system helps improve asset reliability, energy efficiency and operational performance across a range of physical environments, such as buildings, campuses and industrial operations. “The physical world demands more than a powerful AI model. It requires AI to understand how systems actually operate and interact—that is where the next breakthrough is happening,” said Suresh Venkatarayalu, Chief Technology Officer, Honeywell Technologies. “Forge Cognition combines AI with operational context and engineering expertise, opening a new era of intelligent operations where AI can analyze, recommend, and act alongside people.”
A faster path to intelligent buildings and operations
Forge Cognition connects to existing customer deployments, adding AI capabilities to Honeywell Technologies’ suite of solutions. It combines Honeywell Technologies’ decades of domain expertise with assets and systems data in a structured knowledge base, enabling AI agents to discover, contextualize, and analyze equipment behavior and the relationship between systems.
Agents use that context to interpret operating conditions, identify issues, and coordinate responses across connected systems. Applications include:
- Smarter alarm management: AI agents classify and verify building-management alarms to help operators prioritize events that need attention and reduce the number of false positives.
- Predictive asset health: Agents analyze real-time HVAC data to identify emerging equipment issues and guide maintenance, helping operators address problems before they disrupt operations.
- Energy intelligence: Digital twin simulations help operators evaluate operating changes and identify opportunities to reduce energy use while maintaining occupant comfort.
Customer deployments
Honeywell Technologies is piloting Forge Cognition in the US at NVIDIA’s Voyager campus in California and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Pilots are also running at the Fairmont Hotel in Dubai, NEX Mall in Singapore, and at Honeywell Technologies’ campuses in Bangalore, India, and Richardson, Texas. These pilots are providing early examples of how physical AI can help improve the operations of complex facilities across Honeywell Technologies’ installed base of more than 300,000 sites.
Voyager, the iconic building at NVIDIA’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, is a complex operating environment. There, Honeywell Technologies' Forge Cognition pilot showcases the practical application of AI to support smarter operations, faster insights and the future of industrial operations. (See video.)
Results from the Voyager pilot include:
- Smarter alarm management: Up to 90% reduction, on average, in unnecessary alerts so operations teams can focus on what matters most.
- Predictive asset health: Monitors real-time data from HVAC assets, providing health predictions to help teams plan maintenance and reduce the risk of unplanned downtime.
- Energy intelligence: Identified up to 10% potential reduction in energy and utility consumption through more intelligent understanding and optimization of operating conditions.
- Comfort score: Maintained a comfort score above 95%, measured as a weighted average of temperature, humidity and CO2 measurements across zones, to help support a comfortable environment for workers and visitors.
NVIDIA’s Voyager serves as an example of how Forge Cognition can be applied across complex physical environments and provides a blueprint for extending these capabilities across buildings, campuses and industrial operations.
Delivering physical AI technologies for agentic operations
Honeywell Technologies serves the building, industrial, and process sectors with a broad portfolio of services, solutions, and products, underpinned by the Honeywell Technologies Accelerator operating system and Honeywell Technologies Forge intelligence layer. Forge Cognition’s open, interoperable architecture converges IT and OT environments, helping customers make their infrastructure more intelligent, while tapping into leading AI and computing technologies from NVIDIA and Dell Technologies.
NVIDIA Nemotron open models power agents that interpret operational data, including a True Alarm agent that classifies building-management alarms and improves through operator feedback. NVIDIA Omniverse libraries enable physically accurate simulations that help teams model building performance and test operational changes. And NVIDIA Cosmos open models with the NVIDIA Metropolis VSS Blueprint allow vision AI agents to understand, search and summarize live or recorded sensor data. The platform uses NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs and is expanding to accommodate far-edge deployments with NVIDIA DGX Spark to accelerate AI across physical operations.
Dell Technologies provides the AI infrastructure underpinning Forge Cognition through the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, including Dell PowerEdge XE servers, Dell AI Data Platform data and storage engines, Dell cyber resiliency solutions and support from Dell Services, helping Honeywell Technologies develop, train and operationalize the AI models and agents that power intelligent physical operations.
“Physical AI is bringing new intelligence to the complex systems that run our buildings and industrial facilities,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA. “Honeywell Technologies is combining NVIDIA AI and simulation technologies with its deep industrial expertise to help customers anticipate equipment issues, improve reliability and energy efficiency across the infrastructure they already operate.”
"The next wave of AI innovation will be driven by intelligent systems that can reason, learn, and act in the context of real-world operations," said John Roese, global chief technology and chief AI officer, Dell Technologies. "The Dell AI Factory provides the infrastructure and services that support Honeywell's vision for intelligent physical operations."
