How AI can help you in Asset Management—more than you might think

By Stefan Hoffmans, IBM Maximo Application Suite Consultant, Gemba Service

Every day, you work with a huge amount of data about your assets, maintenance, and documentation. But how do you make the most of that information? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly valuable tool. One great example is using AI to support your work preparation—helping you find the right documents faster, right from within IBM MAS. And that’s just the start. In this blog, we’ll share some practical use cases—and we’d love to hear what AI could do for you.

Example: The right information at the right time

Picture this: you’re planning a job and need to find out which lubricant to use for a bearing in a specific asset. The answer is in the documentation somewhere—in a manual, product sheet, or maintenance instruction. But which document? And where in the document?

With the help of an AI assistant, there’s no need to dig through folders or PDFs. You simply type your question in a dedicated tab inside the IBM MAS work order. The AI searches through all linked documentation, understands the context of the asset and the job, and gives you a direct, clear answer.

It also supports your technicians in the field. You can add the AI’s response to the work log so the technician sees the exact same information when they start the job.

AI as a work prep and execution assistant

This example shows how AI can help streamline both planning and execution. You no longer have to switch between systems or search endlessly for relevant documents. Everything happens within IBM MAS. The AI understands the asset you’re working on, knows which documents are linked to it, and can find exactly what you need at that moment—whether that’s a datasheet, certificate, safety procedure, or permit.

It saves you valuable time and lets you focus on the job itself. You always have relevant, up-to-date information at your fingertips. For your technicians, it’s a quick and easy way to access the knowledge they need to work more efficiently and effectively. Whether you’re preparing a job or executing it in the field, AI helps you move faster and make fewer mistakes.

What else can AI do for Asset Management?

AI is already capable of much more. Take automatic work order routing, for example. AI can analyze a work order description and suggest the right resolver group—no manual assignment needed. Or failure coding: based on the language used in the work order, AI can suggest the correct failure class to support more accurate analysis.

Another powerful use case is data standardization. AI can recognize and group different descriptions of the same issue—like “broken,” “not working,” and “malfunctioning”—and recommend consistent terminology. This improves the reliability of your data and makes your reporting more useful.

IBM is also actively developing AI capabilities for asset management. The upcoming release of IBM MAS 9.1 (expected this July) will include several built-in features based on IBM’s Watsonx platform.