By Allison Buenemann, Product Marketing Manager, Imubit
The petrochemical industry faces a skills gap. Experienced engineers and operators are retiring, and fewer new ones are coming in behind them, a pattern seen across manufacturing. According to McKinsey (2025), the share of US manufacturing workers over 55 more than doubled in twenty years, and retirement rates have surged.
In a feature published in Hydrocarbon Processing, Gil Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Imubit, discusses how AI can help close that gap and what it changes for the people who run process plants. The feature describes five changes.
Five ways AI changes the work
- Routine tasks are automated. Technical staff spend less time on manual work and more on complex, higher-value work such as predictive maintenance, process optimization and quality improvement.
- Onboarding is faster. Simulations built from plant process data can strengthen training programs and prepare new staff for operations that run with AI.
- Perceptions of AI change. When AI is deployed to complement people, adoption broadens across every role in the process industries.
- Technology becomes accessible. Tools built for every skill set let people contribute without programming expertise. In the Imubit Platform, process engineers build Deep Learning Process Control® (DLPC®) models in DLPC® Builder with no Python and no machine-learning background.
- Teams decide together. Platforms that bring data from different disciplines into one low-code environment help teams make informed decisions as a group.
People stay in charge
The point of AI here is to make engineers and operators more effective. ARC Advisory Group describes the operator's role in closed-loop AI as "human-on-the-loop": the AI calculates and executes, and the operator moves from manual controller to high-level supervisor. That is how Imubit runs closed loop, inside limits set by plant engineers and on top of the APC and DCS a plant already has.
Companies that invest in AI improve their operations, and they also make the work more attractive to the engineering and operations talent they need to hire and keep.
