Emerson's Liam Hurley on accelerating industrial AI and autonomous operations in energy
At ADIPEC 2025, Liam Hurley, Emerson's president for the Middle East and Africa, laid out a simple promise for operations leaders: move from data collection to decisions that cut emissions, reduce downtime, and keep plants running at top performance.
Emerson's core has always been automation-sensors, valves, and control systems that keep facilities stable and safe. The shift now is deeper analytics across the full chain, turning signals into foresight and action. As Hurley put it, the goal is to help teams run "more effectively and efficiently-improving productivity, safety, reliability, and availability."
From instrumentation to insight (and action)
With new R&D and the integration of AspenTech, Emerson is building a stack that closes the loop between monitoring, prediction, and control. Think fewer blind spots, fewer trips to the field, and fewer unplanned shutdowns.
The focus is clear: use plant data to predict issues early, automate responses where it makes sense, and standardize best practices across assets. That's how you scale performance without adding complexity for your team.
AspenTech integration: where control meets optimization
Bringing AspenTech into the fold gives operators an enterprise view across production, maintenance, and planning-while staying grounded in the control layer. The outcome is practical: optimized throughput, smarter energy use, and faster recovery from deviations.
Hurley highlighted growing demand for autonomous-by-design facilities. The Emerson + AspenTech combo is built for that, giving operations a single environment to run predictive models, tune processes, and automate high-confidence actions.
Cut emissions at the source
For energy producers in the region, emissions control is now a daily KPI. Emerson is pairing sensing technology with advanced analytics to detect and prevent leaks at the source and to automate parts of carbon capture workflows.
The approach speaks to the two big pressures you feel: decarbonization and energy security. Reduce waste, improve uptime, and meet targets without adding friction to day-to-day operations.
Security by design, built to scale
Cybersecurity is baked into Emerson's architecture with a zero-trust stance and alignment to international standards like IEC/ISA 62443. The principle is straightforward: secure, reliable, and scalable as your footprint grows.
That matters whether you're upgrading a brownfield site or standing up a greenfield project. You don't want security to be a bolt-on or a bottleneck.
Autonomy: closer than most think
Fully autonomous operations are a stretch goal, but practical autonomy is already here. Emerson is running pilots across onshore and offshore assets in the region, driven by challenges every ops team knows-distributed sites, harsh conditions, and safety requirements.
The early results point to higher efficiency and productivity, plus safer working conditions. The human role shifts from firefighting to supervising and improving automated routines.
Local execution, long-term commitment
Emerson is investing in localisation across the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia to stay close to projects and customers. That means local talent development, transparent project delivery, and the infrastructure needed to support long-life assets.
What operations leaders can do now
- Pick 2-3 high-yield use cases: emissions monitoring, predictive maintenance on critical assets, energy optimization, and carbon capture control.
- Tighten the data backbone: validate instrumentation, centralize historians, and contextualize data so analytics are trustworthy.
- Close the loop: connect predictions to procedures and, where safe, to automated control actions with clear MOC gates.
- Set cyber guardrails early: asset inventory, segmentation, secure remote access, and policies aligned to IEC/ISA 62443.
- Upskill the crew: control room analysts, reliability engineers, and field techs using the same playbook for model care and alarm hygiene.
- Pilot with purpose: define KPIs, run in shadow mode, then graduate to limited closed-loop control with clear rollback plans.
Metrics that matter
- Unplanned downtime and mean time between failures
- Throughput vs. plan and energy intensity per unit
- Scope 1 emissions, flare volumes, and leak response time
- Controller performance index and alarm rates
- Cyber incident counts and mean time to recovery
What's next from Emerson
Hurley says Emerson is a pure-play automation company doubling down on software, sensors, and valve technologies. The target is an enterprise-level view of operations where contextualized data informs decisions across the asset lifecycle.
For operations, that means fewer surprises, faster decisions, and a cleaner handoff between planning, execution, and continuous improvement.
Want to upskill your ops team on AI and automation? Explore practical courses by role at Complete AI Training.
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