‘Sometimes it’s more expensive than having humans’: Honeywell and Ecolab get real about AI’s limits in the physical world

Putting the latest AI models into buildings, factories and kitchens is much harder than putting them into a chatbot. That was the message from executives at Honeywell and Ecolab, though they were fairly positive about AI overall.

Honeywell Chief Technology Officer Suresh Venkatarayalu said at Fortune’s AIQ Summit at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday that the problem is accuracy. The industrial giant’s customers “really demand 99.9999%,” he said, while frontier models “could be at 85%.”

Ecolab Chief AI Officer AJ Wijesinghe described a different limit: cost. When the company put “the best model that’s out there” on high-volume work, “the tokenomics go off the roof,” he said. “Sometimes it’s more expensive than having humans.”

The water-management company then optimized its models and cut token costs by about 70% to 80%, he said. Ecolab uses both frontier and open-source models, including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s. “Sometimes you don’t have to have the fastest car,” he said.

Neither executive described a fully........

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