Suresh VenkatarayaluCTO, Honeywell Technologies

New Way Now: Honeywell paves the way from automation to autonomy with Google Cloud

24 Apr 2026 · 3 min

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3:01

In this interview, Suresh Venkatarayalu, SVP, CTO and President of Connected Enterprise at Honeywell, explains how the company is leveraging Google Cloud’s AI stack—Gemini, BigQuery, and Vertex AI—to build three core agents (Proposal Assist, Design Agent, and Project Assist) that automate and eventually autonomize critical engineering workflows. Historically, Honeywell’s proposal and design processes were ad‑hoc, taking two to three months and generating waste. By ingesting 20‑30 years of knowledge repositories and digitizing 1.2 million SKUs, the agents can generate proposals, produce design documents, and provide engineers with real‑time insights, cutting cycle times from weeks to hours and reducing overall proposal‑to‑design duration by 30‑50%. The agents also enable rapid margin impact analysis when raw‑material prices shift, automatically identifying affected products and suggesting redesigns. Venkatarayalu emphasizes that this partnership with Google transforms Honeywell from a traditional automation mindset to a semi‑autonomous and fully autonomous operating model, promising a game‑changing acceleration of innovation cycles.

I saw something like 200 questions.
I know, I'm sorry.
You're talking about specialized intelligence. This is not like a productivity lever. It's a transformational lever. Suresh Venkatarayalu, SVP, CTO, and President Connected Enterprise for Honeywell. We are a control system company. Most of the avionics, APUs, engines, mobile computers in warehouses and retail, It's designed by Honeywell. Traditionally, we would have spent most of our time doing voice of customer, producing a proposal document and the design document. The processes were more ad hoc and there weren't any tools to capture the requirements, creating a lot of waste in the system. It would take 2 to 3 months. With the advent of all the agents, you can actually flip from automation to semi-autonomy and full autonomy in certain areas. Google's thinking with the technology and AI stack that they have, it will be a tremendous opportunity to rethink and to shrink that innovation cycle time. We have 3 important agents. One, Proposal Assist, which is generating proposal with specification. Second, Design Agent to produce our design documents. And the third one is Project Assist, which is guiding our 5,000 engineers on specific insights. We actually went and took the last 20 to 30 years of knowledge repositories, and we decided to really pull Gemini and BigQuery on top as our data infrastructure. Then we use Vertex AI for developing our tools and agents on top of the models. The feedbacks are exceptional. Things that could have taken 6 weeks take 4 hours or 6 hours right now. The time it would have taken from initial proposal to design freeze It could be 50%, 30% lesser than what we have done in the past. The biggest issue is when your raw material price goes up, the first question is which products would have a direct impact on pricing and gross margin. To do a deep dive analysis would take months. We are digitizing close to 1.2 million SKUs and we are codifying them in Gemini. An agent will go back and understand which product and what gross margin is going to be eroded. And then we have another agent coming back with solutions and ideas around how can you redesign those products. This will be an absolute game changer. With Google, Honeywell has an opportunity to transform from automation to autonomy.