How Industrial AI Can Empower a Sustainable Workforce for the Future

Globally, renewable energy jobs have already surpassed 13.7 million and are projected to hit 38 million by 2030 (IRENA Renewable energy and jobs: Annual review 2023). Yet the supply of skilled workers is falling behind. The World Economic Forum reports that green job postings are growing more than twice as fast as green skills acquisition.

This imbalance is more than a labour issue. It risks slowing the pace of decarbonisation across energy, manufacturing and heavy industries. If we don’t equip industrial workers with the right mix of digital, technical and environmental skills, we risk falling short of the transition we already have the tools to deliver.

The solution to the green skills gap isn’t only more people—it’s smarter systems that can help people do more. 

This where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. Unlike previous technological revolutions, AI is arriving faster, and with deeper implications. It’s a strategic shift that streamlines operations, enables workers to improve decision-making, and accelerates training. In the industrial sector, AI can play a pivotal role in closing the green skills gap—not just by making machines and processes more efficient, but by empowering people to adapt with confidence.

Rethinking what a sustainable workforce really means
We often measure sustainability in terms of emissions or energy use. But to truly accelerate the energy transition, we also need to rethink how work is designed and reimagined with technology.
In carbon-intensive sectors, future-readiness isn’t just about smart grids or cleaner fuels. It’s also about empowering a sustainable workforce to be:
• Resilient: Equipped with the right tools to navigate complexity with confidence
• Reskilled: Where institutional knowledge isn’t lost to retirement but shared across generations.
• Redesigned: With safer, more meaningful work that is augmented and not replaced by AI

Software and industrial intelligence are essential tools for building a sustainable workforce. They support knowledge transfer from retiring experts, personalise learning pathways, and automate repetitive tasks—allowing workers to focus on higher-value activities such as problem-solving and strategic decision-making.

How Industrial AI can help build a future-ready workforce
Industrial AI is already enabling this shift. It’s helping engineers move from manual troubleshooting to predictive insights. It’s embedding institutional knowledge into everyday tools and workflows. And it’s creating new ways for workers to collaborate, learn, and lead.
But technology is only part of the equation. Real transformation happens when people are empowered to use it — with systems designed to build trust, accelerate learning, and scale expertise across the organisation. Here are three ways industrial leaders can start putting that into practice:

1. Break down silos to drive collaborative insights
AI’s real value isn’t just automation—it’s insight. But insight only matters if it’s shared.

 Industrial AI can help unify data across teams, departments, and value chains. By transforming fragmented information into AI-enriched insights, teams can collaborate more effectively and respond faster to evolving conditions.

Take US-based power leader Dominion Energy: by using AVEVA software in the cloud, it now gathers and securely shares energy performance data across its North American grid, giving teams and different stakeholders real-time visibility into how they’re tracking toward low-carbon goals.

At AVEVA, we believe that sustainable success is founded in this form of radical collaboration: between teams, partners and technology providers. That’s why we’re building the world’s largest digital ecosystem — to turn disparate data into integrated, trusted information that enables better decision-making to support sustainability goals.

2. Design AI systems that support continuous learning
As Industrial AI takes on the routine, there’s a growing premium on human capabilities, from critical thinking to environmental judgment. Companies that invest in these capabilities now will be better prepared for the uncertainties ahead.

AI can’t—and shouldn’t—replace institutional knowledge. But it can help preserve it, share it, and build on it over time. The same tools that improve operational safety and compliance can also empower workers to learn faster and adapt to more sustainable ways of working.

When AVEVA partnered with Freeport, we helped localise digital training across sites in Indonesia. By translating training content into Bahasa Indonesia and aligning it with operator needs, Freeport boosted platform utilisation and worker competency — all while accelerating time-to-performance. 

3. Turn expertise into shared infrastructure
An experienced operator can spot a problem in seconds, but what happens when they retire? That’s the risk of undocumented expertise. Industrial AI offers a way to embed that institutional knowledge into everyday tools and workflows—making proven best practices easier to access, apply, and evolve.

With AVEVA’s Industrial AI Assistant, we turn decades of software know-how into searchable, contextual guidance. Trained on 50+ years of industry experience, it surfaces answers to complex questions while preserving IP and data security—enabling workers to operate with greater autonomy and confidence. 

The result: faster onboarding, better decision-making, and a resilient workforce that doesn’t start from scratch.

Empowering the industrial workforce Is a climate imperative
If we’re serious about decarbonisation, we can’t afford to overlook the human infrastructure that underpins it. The low-carbon energy transition will depend not just on new technologies, but on our ability to equip people with the skills to deploy and manage the solutions already within reach. 

Recognising this urgency to build a future-ready workforce, Rafael Segrera, President of Schneider Electric South America, leads the Green Skills and Jobs working group under Brazil’s Sustainability Business COP so help us all can start now. 

With AI systems that are built to engender trust, with tools that support continuous learning, and with leaders who see AI not as a replacement, we can empower our people to do their most impactful work.


AVEVA is one of the world's foremost industrial software companies, supporting more than 90% of the Fortune 500 to drive efficiency, productivity and decarbonization. Rob McGreevy is leading AVEVA's delegation to COP30 alongside CSO Lisa Wee, and AVEVA is a sponsor of the UK Government Pavilion and the Climate Action Innovation Summit.