The current state of industrial decarbonization in the age of artificial intelligence.

• The industrial sector faces pressure to meet growing energy demands and maintain profitability while simultaneously decarbonizing.
• Multi-generational, AI-driven solutions can make projects repeatable, scalable, and cost-effective.
• Accenture’s “Enabling Transformation 2025” report found that early adopters can unlock billions of dollars in value through large-scale low-carbon infrastructure.

The industrial sector faces a significant challenge: decarbonizing operations while meeting growing energy demands and maintaining profitable growth. Accenture’s latest report, “Enabling Transformation 2025,” highlights the need for substantial emissions reductions in oil, gas, power, and heavy industry to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

The report proposes accelerating decarbonization through capital projects: adopting a multi-generational approach that shifts from customized projects to repeatable system operations, thereby reducing costs and accelerating the deployment and scaling of net-zero infrastructure.

Embedding Artificial Intelligence in Multi-Generational Solutions
Traditionally, infrastructure projects have been treated as independent, one-off endeavors, with planning, financing, and execution often siloed. This approach leads to high costs, long cycles, and limited learning across projects, resulting in slow progress towards industrial decarbonization. Multi-generational, portfolio-driven solutions, however, create a more efficient strategic path through systematic learning, component standardization and modularization, and innovative incentive mechanisms. When artificial intelligence (AI) is integrated into this solution, it generates compounded efficiency gains. Beyond accelerating project progress, AI preserves institutional knowledge, ensuring each project benefits from historical insights and effectively reduces costs.

However, Accenture’s research reveals that 90% of projects are still pursued in a customized manner, with only 10% benefiting from repeatable teams or supply chain systems. Furthermore, 75% of decarbonization projects implemented by heavy industry and energy suppliers focus on short-term projects.

Accelerating decarbonization requires transformation, but it also presents significant economic benefits and growth opportunities. Billions of dollars in value, dramatic cost reductions, and AI-driven returns await those ready to scale low-carbon innovations:

Accenture modeled green hydrogen production as an example, demonstrating that companies adopting a multi-generational strategy experience cost reductions 30% faster than average. In fact, green hydrogen production costs could be 35% lower by 2035, and price parity with gray hydrogen could be achieved by 2037—six years earlier than a project-by-project approach.
For example, meeting 5% of global green hydrogen demand by 2050, a structured, multi-generational green hydrogen production strategy could generate over $60 billion in net present value. The economic benefits of scaling up clean energy applications in heavy industry are significant.
Four levers to enable multi-generational solutions:

1. Building efficient and resilient supply chains: Resilient supply chains are fundamental to industrial decarbonization. However, Accenture research found that 74% of heavy industry executives expect supply chain volatility to negatively impact large capital projects. Addressing supply chain volatility requires cultivating long-term partnerships, promoting standardization and modularization, and strengthening regional supply chains. Through these measures, companies can leverage economies of scale to reduce unit costs by 30-50% in subsequent projects.
2. Cultivating community support and customer demand: Research shows that 52% of heavy industry executives expect insufficient stakeholder engagement to negatively impact capital projects by 2028. By using AI-driven hyper-localized communication strategies (such as digital storytelling and interactive tools), companies can personalize information delivery and effectively explain project benefits, building demand-side momentum.
3. Reshaping talent development, skills systems, and workflows: In the report, only 30% of surveyed companies were confident in managing the workforce transformation associated with these changes. The transition to low-carbon infrastructure and operations requires all employees to acquire new skills and establish new decision-making structures. Adapting workforce skills requires cross-functional, simulation-based, real-time feedback learning, as well as utilizing centralized knowledge repositories, digital operating manuals, and AI-driven analytical tools to help teams systematically summarize experiences and share project insights. Ultimately, more flexible collaboration models mean that decision-making authority will shift from top-down decision-making systems to empowering local teams with real-time, project-specific knowledge.
4. Building a strong digital core to drive AI learning: Artificial intelligence will play a transformative role in industrial decarbonization by embedding continuous learning mechanisms across the entire project portfolio. However, most companies say it will take 1-3 years to build a strong digital core. Integrating AI with a strong digital core in capital projects can both preserve institutional knowledge and extract insights from project data, thereby accelerating the learning curve. AI can also unify operational processes, enabling automated decision-making and predictive insights such as pattern detection.

While the path to industrial decarbonization is complex, multi-generational solutions offer a viable path. Companies that integrate multi-generational solutions into net-zero infrastructure development will achieve compounded cost-effective growth, solidify their competitive advantage, and drive industrial transformation. The core challenge over the next 25 years lies in execution: scaling up lessons learned from fragmented initiatives and transforming them into a portfolio-driven, self-sustaining, and economically viable transformation system.

The transformation has already begun. Industry leaders are demonstrating that industrial decarbonization is not only a sustainability initiative but also a growth engine, through AI-driven supply chains, standardized best practices, and market demand creation. First movers will seize the financial opportunities of the next industrial era.

Authors:

Stephanie Jamison, Chair of Accenture’s Global Resources Industry Practice and Global Head of Sustainability Services

This article was originally published on the World Economic Forum Agenda blog.