Honeywell’s Jason Urso: How AI Is Disrupting Our Industry, and What We Can Do About It

Artificial Intelligence is no longer the future; it is the present. It’s reshaping landscapes, altering industries, and transforming the way we live and work. With its rapid advancement, AI is causing disruption — for better or worse — in every field imaginable. While it promises efficiency and growth, it also brings challenges and uncertainties that professionals and businesses must navigate. What can one do to pivot if AI is disrupting their industry? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jason Urso.

Jason Urso is Vice President R&D and Chief Technology Officer at Honeywell, responsible for the design, development and introduction of industrial automation and sensing offerings. Prior to his current role, he was Vice President and General Manager at Honeywell, where he led the global industrial Measurement and Control business within Honeywell Process Solutions. Jason’s two-decade career at Honeywell has grounded his technology expertise and strength in driving global teams of engineers, program managers and support staff to deliver business growth with new best-in-class solutions.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. What brought you to your specific career path?

I graduated as a software engineer and was interested in the linkage between the digital and real world — determining how we could use digital technologies to influence the world around us. In essence, this was the beginning of IoT 30 years ago.

Honeywell gave me the opportunity to solve real world industrial problems using automation. One example is human error, which is a leading cause of safety injuries and fatalities. So, the ability to automate processes, remove personnel from hazardous areas, and to assure human actions always follow the best practice can literally be a life saver. Throughout my time with Honeywell, I’ve observed that the digital technologies are making profound differences in the world around us — making people safer, improving energy efficiency which in turn improves the environment, getting life saving drugs in the hands of patients and creating the products that make our lives easier.

So, for me, this notion of being able to contribute to society is something I am very proud of. In fact, I would now call it a mission versus a career.

Which three-character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success?

Perseverance is number one — the problems we’re solving as engineers have never been solved before. To solve them requires perseverance to overcome the inevitable challenges faced in creating something completely new. Second, creativity — think of the world the way it should be vs. how it is. Opening your mind to creative thinking — about how you can change something that you’ve known to be true for a long period of time — is something that requires a lot of creativity. Lastly, for me, would be impatience. I’m constantly questioning why things can’t be done faster and better. It’s a natural curiosity and a desire to make changes as quickly as we can, especially if you know the types of changes that you’re making have profound benefits in society.

What do you think makes your company stand out?

Honeywell solves some of the world’s toughest challenges like running complex industrial plants safely, assuring aircraft can be flown safely and reliably and how buildings can run effectively and efficiently while ensuring comfort and health. We provide products, systems and know-how that solves these incredibly complicated challenges through automation.

The way we approach our customer problems is unique. We deeply engage with customers and have relationships that span decades. Those relationships and insights contribute to the creation of new technologies. Having that depth of domain experience coupled with a breadth of expertise in digital technologies is something that allows Honeywell to distinguish itself in the markets we serve. The intersection between industry knowledge is the foundation by which we deliver value to customers in areas that can include:

Enabling industrial plants to improve throughput, yield energy efficiency and become more efficient.

Assisting life science companies with digital recordkeeping for compliance.

Improving cybersecurity to ensure that digital technologies can be employed in a way that is safe and reliable within the context of an industrial facility.

If you look across industrial automation to aerospace to buildings, we all serve the same automation mission for different end users, and in each one of those cases it requires a unique knowledge base to understand the problems that we are solving and the best way to apply the digital technologies that we have in the portfolio.

What is your favorite “life lesson quote?” Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?

I’ve always been a baseball fan. Being born in New York I’ve always followed the Yankees baseball team. A famous manager of the team, Joe Torre, once said “a winner is somebody who goes out there every day and exhausts himself trying to get something accomplished.” That’s applicable to not only a baseball team, but any team that wants to achieve something great. It’s the people that come in with a higher mission and put the time and effort into overcoming all the challenges to achieve that mission. That’s what makes individuals successful.

As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making?

Having a very strong culture of awareness around safety is important and influences everything that I do in the automation industry. We are solving problems that have safety critical consequences. So, it’s essential to always keep safety at the forefront of our thinking — to the extent that the safety culture is embraced by everyone within my organization. Once we can ensure safe operations, our focus is oriented around delivering customer benefits like improving efficiency and productivity, and increasing throughput, yield, reliability, energy efficiency and human efficiency within an industrial facility.

Can you explain how AI is disrupting the industrial sector? Is this disruption hurting or helping your bottom line?

AI is disrupting industries in many ways. From supply chain to product quality, industries are benefitting from all that AI has to offer. For instance, we are applying AI with our customers to enhance workforce expertise. Meaning that we are helping more junior personnel operate like 30-year experts by applying AI and large language models. A more junior person can now query a virtual assistant to determine how to diagnose an issue. AI can search the enterprise knowledge base and provide an answer — almost like having the world’s best expert available to every person all the time. In doing so, we hope to close the expertise gap and ensure every person operates like a world leading expert.

The AI technology disruption will continue to evolve and inevitably offer benefits in production reliability and throughput — all areas that will benefit customers’ bottom line and have a beneficial impact on the suppliers of the technology that are helping to create the customer outcome.

Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact in the industrial sector?

There are two areas where AI is poised to make a large impact in the industrial sector: Improved reliability and enhancing workforce capability.

Improvements to reliability result from employing new sensor technologies like video and acoustic, and applying AI and machine learning to detect equipment abnormalities. In essence, this is a digital method of replacing human senses like sight and hearing by applying a digital version of human cognition. This allows us to reduce unplanned equipment outages by becoming more predictive and proactive with respect to equipment health.

When it comes to enhancing workforce capabilities, AI has the potential to address the skills gap and labor shortages in the industrial space. This is where generative AI can play a prominent role as I mentioned. For example, consider a 30-year maintenance technician that encounters an equipment issue. They know from experience what the issue is because they have seen it before — much like a doctor with 30 years of experience diagnosing a medical condition. But a person with just two years of experience might have more difficulty recognizing the issue and hence need assistance. What if the person with two years of experience could describe the condition to a digital assistant and have AI search the enterprise history to determine if such a condition has occurred before? And the digital assistant can respond with a diagnosis and recommended course of action based on that history. This will help the two-year expert perform like the 30-year expert, ultimately increasing employee safety.

With the combination of improvements in expertise to improvements in reliability, we see a new generation of what I would call digital cognition — the ability to use AI to see things that otherwise wouldn’t have been seen and to act on issues before they occur. AI is at an inflection point that will provide a new generation of benefits for the industrial space.

What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?

Like all new technologies, upskilling to understand the technology and changing work processes to embrace the technology is a challenge. But as an automation company our job has always been to incorporate new technology in ways that create additional benefits for our customers. We are a technology company and as such we are a learning company. So, increasing our competency to employ technologies like AI is inherent in our company DNA. That said, upskilling requires processes and tools to support knowledge growth. I’m fortunate that Honeywell provides an environment for the workforce to learn and grow — whether its structured training, or pairing more junior personnel with experts for mentoring, or just sharing successful use cases that others can emulate.

How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?

Really everyone stands to gain from applying AI. From a software engineer that uses AI to help generate code to a business leader that is searching for changes in market dynamics, AI provides a method of synthesizing data into actionable insights. Of course, in every discipline there will be a need to understand how to apply AI, and how to validate its results. So, ultimately all skills will benefit, and some skills will have a higher learning curve to apply AI effectively.

What are “Five Things You Need to Do, If AI Is Disrupting Your Industry?”

Assess Current Capabilities and Needs: Conduct a thorough assessment of the company’s current technological capabilities and identify areas where AI can provide the most value. This involves understanding the specific needs and challenges of the industry. In industrials, we have found opportunities for AI to disrupt our supply chain challenges and create opportunities for market dominance of our products that have their own AI capabilities.

Develop a Comprehensive AI Roadmap: Create a detailed AI adoption roadmap that outlines the vision, goals, and timelines for AI integration. This roadmap should include short-term and long-term objectives, resource allocation, and key performance indicators to measure success.

Build a Skilled AI Team: Assemble a team of AI experts, data scientists, and engineers who can drive the AI initiatives. Investing in talent acquisition and continuous training is crucial to ensure the team stays updated with the latest AI advancements.

Pilot AI Projects and Scale Gradually: Start with pilot projects to test AI applications in specific areas of the business. Use the insights gained from these pilots to refine strategies and gradually scale successful AI solutions across the organization.

Ensure Robust Data Management and Security: Implement strong data management practices to ensure the quality, integrity, and security of data used in AI systems. This includes establishing data governance policies, ensuring compliance with regulations, and protecting sensitive information.

Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!

About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.