Rockwell Automation has been running an in-house AI tool called the GenAI-Powered Maintenance Copilot at its manufacturing facility in Singapore since October 2025, helping technicians diagnose machine faults without paging through equipment manuals or tracking down a colleague who has seen the same error before. The tool runs on OpenAI's GPT-5.4-mini and was built using Azure OpenAI in Microsoft Foundry, drawing on a database of troubleshooting knowledge assembled from Rockwell engineers with 20 to 30 years of shop-floor experience.
When a machine throws an error, the copilot searches that database and organizes likely causes by symptom, cause and reaction, so a technician can see whether a worn gear or a faulty sensor is the more probable culprit. It also answers natural-language questions pulled from the equipment manuals themselves. "I used to have to look for colleagues or senior technicians and ask them if they'd seen that error before," says Mangleswaran Mahalingam, an engineering assistant at the site who now consults the tool through AR goggles while overseeing about 50 machines. "Now, I can type my questions in the copilot on my tablet and get answers from it."
Singapore plant director Li Wang says the standardized troubleshooting has cut machine downtime by 33 percent and lowered servicing and spare-parts costs by about 25 percent, according to Rockwell's internal tracking. On a shop floor where inconsistent repair methods introduce their own source of process variation, tying every technician to the same diagnostic logic functions as a quality-control measure, not just a maintenance one. Rockwell also says the copilot has shortened onboarding, with new hires now reaching troubleshooting competency in three months instead of nine.
The Singapore site earned a World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse designation in June, with the WEF crediting AI tools there, including the maintenance copilot, a multi-agent quality assurance system that flags assembly-line defects in real time, and a predictive maintenance system, for a 43 percent increase in units per person-hour, a 35 percent drop in defects and a 67 percent reduction in time-to-competency.
Rockwell plans to extend the maintenance copilot beyond Singapore to its plant in Twinsburg, Ohio, along with facilities in Poland and Mexico, according to chief supply chain officer Bob Buttermore. Rockwell operates more than 25 plants worldwide.
