Lessons Learned from Envisioning a Gen AI-Based Product: The Journey Behind ABB’s Industrial Knowledge Vault 🚀

In today’s fast-paced industrial world, the ability to preserve and share expertise across teams is more critical than ever. ABB’s Ability™ Industrial Knowledge Vault is a groundbreaking solution that leverages Generative AI to safeguard expertise and empower workforces—helping industries overcome the challenge of retiring workers and the knowledge gap left behind. 🌍

I had the unique opportunity to collaborate with ABB’s product management team in a 12-week discovery process that turned a one-liner from ABB’s leadership into a fully realized, game-changing product. Here's how we did it. ⏳

The Vision: Transforming a One-Liner into a Product 🧩

Our journey began with a single line of vision from ABB: "A solution to safeguard expertise and empower workforces through AI." This broad idea launched us into a deep discovery phase. The challenge? Translating this vision into actionable insights that would solve real-world problems. 🤔

By the end of the 12 weeks, we had a refined product definition that aligned with ABB’s business goals and addressed core customer pain points—we were ready to build. ✅

The Discovery Process: 12 Weeks of Innovation 💡

The 12-week process was divided into key phases to ensure the product was aligned with both customer needs and ABB’s strategic objectives.

1. Week 1-4: Envisioning Goals 🔍
2. Week 5-8: Hypothesis Sense-Making 🔬
3. Week 9-12: Concept Testing & Validation ✅

The ABB Ability™ Industrial Knowledge Vault: Key Features 🌟

Developed in partnership with Microsoft, this solution leverages ABB Genix™ CoPilot and Azure OpenAI Service to transform how industries manage knowledge.

Key features include:

• Effortless Workflow Generation: Using natural language input, workers can generate structured procedures in seconds, removing the need for manual document parsing. 📄➡️🧠
• Real-Time Guidance & Decision Support: Providing in-the-moment insights that empower workers to make better, faster decisions. 💡
• Role-Based Access & Compliance: Ensuring critical knowledge is up-to-date and accessible to the right teams, streamlining compliance and version control. 🔒🔑

Why It Matters: Driving Continuous Improvement 🔄

The Industrial Knowledge Vault continuously learns from real-world operations, improving workflows and refining best practices. By integrating with existing industrial systems, it enhances collaboration between field workers and control rooms, offering real-time visibility into job status and reducing bottlenecks. 🌐

ABB’s solution is not just about preserving knowledge; it’s about empowering teams to work smarter, faster, and more sustainably—creating operational continuity and a culture of continuous improvement. 🔧✨

Conclusion: Empowering the Workforce of Tomorrow 🚀

From a vague vision to an AI-powered product that supports workforce empowerment and knowledge retention, the ABB Ability™ Industrial Knowledge Vault is changing the game in industrial knowledge management. As industries grow more data-driven, solutions like this are key to ensuring employees have the right expertise at their fingertips, whenever they need it. 💼🔍

The journey continues as ABB refines and scales the solution—bringing AI and innovation to the forefront of industrial success. 💥

Link to ABB Press Release - ABB Ability™ Industrial Knowledge Vault - Connected Workforce software | Connected Workforce | ABB

Credits 🎉

• ABB Product Leadership Team: A special thank you to the talented product managers and leadership at ABB for their collaboration and dedication throughout the discovery process. Tyron Vardy Sanjit Shewale Marko Sommarberg Harold Martinez and entire PAPI/PADI Team.
• Microsoft Account Team: Thank you for the technical expertise and support, enabling us to leverage cutting-edge AI technology in creating this product. Maikel van Verseveld Ambrish Prasad Eric Jackson Igor Balashov Louis Rondeau Elorie Karen Hartmann Østergaard Boris Hochreutener
• Partnership 2.0 ISD Team: Big shout out to the core team members from P2.0 project team who worked with ABB product team right from the early ideation stages of this use case 😊.
• Karthikeyan Ravichandran : Program Manager
• Viraj Deo : UX/UI Design
• Srinivas Tattari Karthikeyan Ravichandran   : Project Manager
• Suchandra Sengupta : Data Architect
• Sebastiano Fuccio : Program Arch (Former)
• Priyal Doshi       : Data Scientist
• Tomas Letko      : Manufacturing SL Architect
• Ashmita Arvind Pandey (Ash) : Lead AI/Solutions Developer
• Yolanda Ocampo Escobar : Go to Market Consultant
• Aakanksha Sharma : Group Product Manager

Let’s Connect 🔗

If you found this journey insightful, I’d love to hear your thoughts or discuss how AI and product management can drive transformation in industries. Feel free to reach out! 💬