“Our classes will work for any organization”: Honeywell AI heads share strategies that helped the company advance its AI efforts

“Every function and every strategic business unit is now using new generation AI,” said Sheila Jordan, the company’s chief digital officer, who oversees the integration of AI internally within the organization. luck. “The other thing I’m very proud of is that we offer it to all 100,000 employees.”

The company built its own “Honeywell GPT,” which helps employees draft and edit emails, summarize technical documents, translate content, and brainstorm ideas. Employees also use Red, a virtual assistant that serves as a central resource to access company information about IT, finance, HR, and the company policy library. Engineers are programming with AI, and the company is reimagining its diverse products and services with new generative offerings powered by AI. Overall, the company has 24 generative AI initiatives in production and 12 more on the way. Compared to 16 a year ago.

As companies across business sectors integrate AI into their operations, an emerging body of best practices reveals a variety of approaches, from decentralized cultures based on experimentation to tightly tailored strategies that can be scaled across the organization. Honeywell, which ranked 17th on the Fortune AIQ 50 list of Fortune 500 companies with the most “mature” AI capabilities, is a case study in how to excel by taking the latter approach.

Jordan and CTO Suresh Venkatarayalu, who oversees its AI product efforts, believe the company’s success in advancing its AI capabilities stems directly from its “six-act AI framework.” Combined with the organization’s top-down approach to AI, adherence to the framework has allowed them to focus on immediate impact efforts in order to unleash the flywheel effect.

“What are the use cases? And can I measure and track them?” Venkatarayalu said, describing how the company is focused on impact. “In fact, tomorrow we have a meeting with Sheila and the CFO to look at the roadmap for 2026 and ask me the real question: ‘Can we trace it to P&L?’ And we should trace it to P&L. That’s the way it’s set up.”

Six point strategy

In the fast-moving world of AI, it can be difficult to prioritize, stay on track, and resist trying to do everything at once. That’s why Honeywell leadership created a six-act framework in early 2024 to guide the organization’s AI efforts and keep them focused strictly on the use cases they believe will truly move the needle.

“We can get distracted by all the noise and all the things that people might want to do, but we have a whole program to prioritize those things that are going to move the needle on business value, whether in terms of productivity or growth and innovation,” Jordan said, adding that the organization “would have felt overwhelmed and lost” without the framework and clarity from her and Venkatarayalu about the right generative AI capabilities to implement.

The first chapter of the framework covers tools – such as Red and Honeywell GPT – designed to assist employees in their daily workflow. Then there is the second chapter, which focuses on the use of generative AI in engineering. The third chapter is how the company “thinks about cognitive automation,” Jordan said, specifically how it uses the different LLMs (Large Language Models) from Azure. GoogleAWS and others for specific use cases. Next, Chapter 4 looks at generative AI in commercial applications that they buy and use, e.g Sales force And other platforms. Chapter 5 focuses on the company’s products and services. Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on sales effectiveness.

“I think our classes would be a good fit for any organization,” Venkatarayalu said. “It’s productivity, it’s growth, and it’s profit margins.”

Chasing the flywheel effect

The fact that the technology can be applied to so many use cases is one of the biggest challenges to overcome, so it’s helpful to start with those that have the greatest immediate impact, Jordan said. In this way, those early successes can move efforts forward.

For example, she said early work with GitHub and Copilot were “early movers” and delivered the value they thought they would bring, which got the AI ​​effort off to a strong start.

“If it works, the flywheel takes off. If it doesn’t work, it dies, right? So I wanted a flywheel effect where we could do something and show the organization the value of AI generation,” she said.

This means going into a feasibility study with a value proposition in mind, but being open to value coming in a different way than assumed, she said.

“We could say that (the value) would be productivity, but in reality, it was a play on sales effectiveness. We got a higher conversion from something. So I would just say to stay very open to the business benefits, because they can shift based on customer and partner interactions,” Jordan added.

Top-down approach

Another key element to keeping an organization on target and committed to its AI framework is its top-down approach.

Venkatarayalu noted how other companies start with a lot of proof of concepts, allowing business units to pursue their own strategies and democratize AI efforts. But not Honeywell, which he said is “mostly top-down” when it comes to artificial intelligence.

“I think this company looks at use cases first, value second,” he said. “And once we — along with the CEO, chairman and business unit leaders — believe (that a use case will provide value), then we drive it. I think that’s a very different (mindset) than many of my colleagues.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of Honeywell business units.