Honeywell India operates as a critical growth engine for the company’s global strategy, leveraging over 14,000 employees, three advanced manufacturing facilities and four global centres of excellence driving AI-led, sustainable innovations built in India and scaled up globally. “India is extremely significant to our global innovation engine,” says Anant Maheshwari, president and CEO, Global Regions, Honeywell. In an interview with Sudhir Chowdhary, he speaks about the key trends and his company’s strategy for accelerating AI adoption among its clients. Excerpts:
What are your top priorities for Honeywell’s India business?
Honeywell globally is undergoing a strategic transformation and is focused on three core segments: building automation, process automation and technology, and industrial automation. All three are extremely relevant for India, not just for Honeywell but for the country’s broader growth story.
India is among the fastest-growing economies globally, with a very balanced growth path. While services remain strong, manufacturing, especially electronics and industrial infrastructure, is increasingly important. That makes our portfolio highly relevant. For services-led growth you need buildings, and for industrial expansion you need process and industrial automation.
Our building automation business is doing very well in India, driven by airports, hospitals, hotels, and commercial infrastructure. In process automation and technology, we have decades-long partnerships with Indian energy companies, from traditional fuels to biofuels and emerging energy solutions. Industrial automation is also becoming critical as India’s industrial base expands.
Today, Honeywell India is close to a billion-dollar business, and we expect to grow in strong double digits, faster than both the economy and the market. To do that, our priorities are clear: strong manufacturing capability, deep engineering and innovation capacity, and world-class talent. We have multiple engineering centres and labs in India that innovate not just for India, but from India for the world. Equally important is our strong customer and channel presence across the country, which also creates large-scale employment.
Tell us about your recent innovations in terms of AI and automation.
About six years ago, we launched Honeywell Forge, one of the earliest cloud-native platforms in the industrial domain, built on Microsoft Azure. That positioned us very well when AI began accelerating around 2023. At the same time, we have decades of experience running control systems in buildings and process industries, systems that already operate in a closed loop of sensing, decision-making, and action. What we have done over the last three years is combine that full-loop operational capability with the Forge platform.
2025 has been a breakout year for what we call physical AI — AI applied to buildings, industrial, and process environments. We now have more than 200,000 sites globally using these capabilities. The outcomes are very clear: higher efficiency, better asset effectiveness, and workforce enablement. These three E’s define the value customers see from AI in operational environments.
What are the key demand drivers for Honeywell and which areas are receiving the highest investment priority?
The demand driver has always been customer benefit. If customers see cost reduction, revenue enhancement, and improved asset performance reflected in their profit and loss statement and balance sheet, demand follows.
Today, AI, specifically physical AI, is simply the tool delivering what customers have always wanted: efficiency, effectiveness, and enablement. In buildings, momentum is very strong across hospitality, healthcare, airports, and large commercial complexes. On the process side, connected plants have taken off. We have connected more than a thousand reactor sites globally, many of which have moved to our highest service tier, Performance Plus, delivering measurable performance improvement.
How central is Honeywell India to your global innovation strategy?
India is extremely significant to our global innovation engine. To give just one example, Honeywell’s global CTO and president of Honeywell Connected, Suresh Venkatarayalu, built his career in our India technology centre before taking on global leadership roles.
India has one of Honeywell’s largest engineering talent bases worldwide. Importantly, this innovation is not limited to software. We do substantial hardware design and product innovation here. We recently launched Make-in-India cameras, and we operate one of only two Honeywell process technology pilot plants globally, one in the United States and one in Gurugram.
Across buildings, process automation, and industrial automation, India plays a leading role. Innovation for West Asia and Asia-Pacific is often driven from India, making it a critical link in Honeywell’s global value chain.
Many enterprises experiment with pilot AI projects but hesitate to scale up. Do you believe your customers are ready for mission-critical deployments?
In energy and buildings, AI has already moved to scale. Some customers are leading, and others are now following after seeing peer success. These are mission-critical deployments. A good example is the Borouge plant in West Asia, where an autonomous control room is now going live in full operations.
For those still transitioning, I would not call the challenges barriers. It is about acceleration. The first element is people, training, awareness, and trust. In operational environments, physical AI enhances human work rather than replaces it.
Beyond people, there are three technical fundamentals: data access, domain expertise, and determinism. Unlike IT environments, operational data is not readily available. You need deep domain understanding to interpret it, and AI in operations must be deterministic, not probabilistic. When those three elements come together, organisations move rapidly from pilots to scale.