Cognite Flows: From Insight to Industrial Action

Cognite’s launch of Cognite Flows – the new action layer of the Cognite industrial AI and data platform – indicates a shift in industrial software from insight generation to frontline execution. As industrial firms look to operationalize AI, the focus is on moving beyond just delivering insights and towards embedding intelligence directly into workflows. Verdantix research reflects this trend, with senior decision-makers ranking automating frontline operational decisions as a higher priority than analytical or back-office use cases.

Cognite Flows acts as an action layer built on top of Cognite Data Fusion (CDF), and integrates with Cognite’s agentic platform, Atlas AI. Together, these solutions enable operational experts to rapidly build and scale workflows by leveraging agentic coding tools for custom application development. The result is a platform that both surfaces insights and drives action.

A defining feature of Cognite Flows is its focus on the frontline worker. The platform delivers a unified, single-screen workspace that integrates AI-driven insights, custom-built applications and real-time industrial data. Its adaptive interface adjusts to user roles and tasks, rather than forcing workers to navigate fragmented systems.

However, scaling AI analytics across assets, sites and organizations remains a persistent challenge for industrial firms – over 60% identify this as a key priority over the next two years. Cognite addresses this by combining multimodal, contextualized data from its knowledge graph with domain expertise and rapid application deployment capabilities, resulting in significantly reduced time-to-value. For example, a pharmaceutical firm using the platform developed and deployed three custom applications in six months, after previously spending 16 months without reaching production.

As organizations accelerate the development of agentic applications, concerns around governance, trust and data quality are becoming increasingly prominent. Over 70% of firms in the Verdantix industrial transformation survey cite a lack of trust in AI-generated insights as a significant barrier to scaling industrial AI initiatives. Against this backdrop, a key differentiator in vendor selection could be an ecosystem-led and governed approach to application development, as seen in Cognite’s new offering.

While other vendors are also developing agent- and application-building capabilities, Cognite’s certification process stands out. Its approach includes formal certification, compliance checks and ongoing governance of the applications produced, with a 24-hour SLA enabling rapid application testing and certification.

By combining AI, data and workflow orchestration within a governed environment, Cognite is positioning itself beyond the data platform layer and into the operational execution layer. On a wider scale, this is indicative of a shift in the evolution of industrial software towards systems of action. As the market matures, vendors that can successfully bridge the gap between insight and action while maintaining control and trust will define the next phase of industrial transformation. It remains to be seen how impactful these applications will be in practice – particularly when it comes to closing the loop on autonomous execution – amid ongoing challenges around trust, governance and deployment in safety-critical environments.

To read more about emerging technology in the industrial analytics and data management space, check out the Verdantix Insights page.