Organizations across industries rely on physical assets to succeed – from the machines on factory floors, to office buildings, and even public infrastructure like bridges and trains. If these fail, the consequences are steep. Businesses know this and crave technology to help prevent costly downtime, manage their assets more efficiently, and plan ahead.

Today, I am excited to announce that IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS) version 9.1 is now generally available. This release brings powerful new capabilities to MAS, designed to empower clients with the technology they need to deploy end-to-end asset lifecycle management in the data and AI era. Maximo has excelled at this for 40 years with proven leadership in the Asset Lifecycle Management market. The 9.1 release marks the next step in our journey to comprehensively support AI-enabled asset lifecycle management practices. By providing innovations including capital planning tools and a Gen AI assistant embedded within MAS, businesses can leverage this new technology to reach unprecedented efficiency and operational growth this year.

Meet Maximo Assistant: A new Gen AI powered specialist built into MAS

Imagine that you are a maintenance manager in need of timely additional information on a machine failure. Getting an expert on-site to do an inspection can take a long time, delaying the resolution and extending costly downtime. Now, you could turn to Maximo Assistant in this situation to provide key insights within seconds to help accelerate the process. This natively built Gen AI chat experience allows users to leverage natural language capabilities to converse with their asset data. They can prompt the assistant with questions such as “which work orders are missing job plans”, “show me the sum of the total cost of work orders per site” and more.  The assistant is built to deliver a quick response without even leaving Maximo and quickly proceed with the next steps to address the issue.

Maximo Assistant is designed to support employees in their effort to proactively maintain assets for more efficient operations. This is now available as part of the broader Maximo AI Service, a collection of AI capabilities within MAS that supports enhancing workforce productivity. The AI Service leverages watsonx.ai, an enterprise-grade AI developer studio, to support the assistant’s conversational capabilities.

Asset investment planning quicker than you can say ‘what if?’

Another key innovation now available in the 9.1 release is Maximo Asset Investment Planning (AIP). This new feature underpins Maximo’s ability to support end-to-end asset lifecycle management. AIP will enable users to generate and compare multiple scenarios for investment in their assets based on their business priorities with rapid weighted analysis and multi-objective optimization to balance cost, risk, and performance.

It’s critical for organizations to align their investments with business objectives, key performance indicators, and regulatory standards. Maximo Asset Investment Planning provides data-driven insights and customizable value frameworks to help them make these decisions based on relevant and accessible data.

We are excited to see organizations leverage this new feature to support a more holistic approach to their asset lifecycle management, drive operational efficiency, address lifecycle costs, and support long-term asset sustainability.

Expanding Maximo’s reach to real estate & facilities management

With this release, we are also offering our clients a comprehensive solution for real estate and facilities management within MAS. Maximo Real Estate and Facilities brings powerful features such as space management for users to optimize how they use their workspaces, facility condition assessments to identify risks and prioritize investments and repairs, and capital planning which supports cost-saving project management. In addition, the tool offers lease administration and accounting capabilities to help them address their contractual requirements and keep their data easily accessible to streamline reporting in accordance with different regulatory requirements,

IBM has incorporated our real estate and facilities management technology within MAS to support organizations’ need for efficiency and consolidated processes. From warehouses and data centers to critical assets such as HVAC units and generators, MAS is now an industry recognized hub for businesses seeking to manage the full lifecycle of their real estate and facilities.

Coming up

Even as we hit the ground running with these new features, it’s crucial to look ahead. As AI capabilities continue rapidly evolving and organizations seek to become even more proactive and efficient, MAS will adapt to our customers’ needs.

The next generation of AI innovation is already here. AI agents, a more autonomous type of generative AI, are playing a larger role in asset management. When it comes to asset lifecycle management, embedding these capabilities to complement human expertise will become essential to drive speedy innovation. We intend to continue innovating and building an even more comprehensive solution to help organizations reach more efficient and sustainable operations.