How Are Maintenance Teams Using AI Tools Right Now?

When it comes to mapping out a maintenance program in 2025, exploring ways to include AI is clearly a priority for many leaders. In fact, by 2026, 65% of maintenance teams will be using AI tools, according to our State of Industrial Maintenance report. Meanwhile, 44% percent say they’ve already implemented AI in their operations in some capacity. 

So how are maintenance teams using AI-powered tools today? And, more importantly, what benefits have they seen so far? Here are four reasons why teams are getting behind AI adoption.

Takeaways:

• AI is helping address the industry’s knowledge transfer challenges as more technicians retire.
• Leaders report that AI tools are helping them prevent equipment failures.
• The technology is boosting team productivity by improving scheduling and resource allocation.
• With AI-powered analysis tools, leaders are able to make data-driven decisions faster.

Key Benefits of AI in Maintenance

Knowledge Capture and Sharing

Over the next five years, the Hudson Institute reported that as much as 40% of the maintenance workforce could retire. 

Maintenance leaders are finding that AI tools can help them grapple with the reality of the growing skills gap. “Knowledge capture and sharing” emerged as the most frequently cited advantage of AI, referenced by 38% of leaders who’ve implemented the technology. 

AI tools can capture insights directly from technicians’ workflows, helping teams quickly create repositories for maintenance expertise that would otherwise be lost.

And when training inexperienced technicians, AI’s instant guidance can be a game-changer. To get the job done correctly and efficiently, technicians can lean on AI assistants for support. These tools can pull up answers from years of maintenance data, manuals, and your team’s previous work, making it easy to find specifications, troubleshoot issues, or follow safety steps.

“We’ve used AI to help with our lockout tagout procedures. For example, to change a bandsaw blade, we needed to lock out the motor. The first thing MaintainX CoPilot said was to shut off the breaker, which verified our thinking. To go through the entire manual to find that information would have been pretty hard, but CoPilot showed us exactly where to find it.”
-Jeremiah Dotson, facility maintenance manager at Amfab Steel

Beating Unplanned Downtime

As the cost of downtime continues to rise, amping up failure prevention measures has become more critical than ever for maintenance teams. The good news is that emerging AI tools are already producing results on that front—36% of leaders who have brought AI into their operations report that it’s reducing unexpected equipment failures.

For example, a chemical manufacturer might use AI to stop equipment failures before they happen by setting up triggers when an industrial mixer exceeds a set temperature or vibration threshold.

And where traditional approaches have failed, maintenance leaders are putting their trust in AI technology as a new solution. Of companies that experienced more downtime than expected last year, 40% have implemented AI across multiple maintenance processes. Meanwhile, since their motivation to experiment with innovative solutions is less urgent, only 18% of leaders who experienced less downtime have fully implemented AI.

Productivity Gains

AI is also helping teams become more efficient, which is key to controlling costs. Adopting AI has improved scheduling and resource allocation, according to 35% of maintenance leaders. These tools can take the guesswork out of maintenance planning by using historical work order data—for example, a monthly preventive maintenance task for a conveyor system—to accurately forecast how long that task will take to complete.

When it comes to work order completion, 34% of maintenance leaders report better performance thanks to AI tools. AI assistants can also speed up time-consuming tasks like digital procedure creation, giving everyone access to the instructions they need to keep equipment reliable and safe.

“We’re continuing improvements on the procedures side and getting better at using the AI features, which is great at giving us a jumpstart. You can get writer's block when you're thinking about how to make a procedure, but the AI system allows you to quickly jump into it.” Ryan Bell, assistant general manager of public works, Villages Golf and Country Club

Smarter Maintenance Through Data

For 35% of leaders, implementing AI has translated to better data-driven decisions. 

Many leaders use AI for cost tracking and optimization. For example, AI tools can evaluate historical parts consumption and shipping data to predict the best times to order critical spare parts. This helps teams avoid expensive downtime and emergency parts shipping costs.

When you provide maintenance data like past work orders, AI tools can analyze and reveal root causes of failures. And beyond just identifying equipment issues, the technology can recommend solutions that help you take faster, more effective action.

How to Make AI Work for Your Team

If these benefits have you curious about the next steps for AI implementation on your team, we have some recommendations.

• Clean up and digitize your data: First, keep in mind that, no matter how powerful the model, AI technology is only as useful as the information you feed it. Digitizing your day-to-day operations so your AI tools have access to a steady diet of clean data is the first step toward breakthroughs like the examples above.

• Pick a specific area for improvement: In a recent chat with our cofounder, Nick Haase, Daniel Marchant, service manager at Xylem, pointed to the power of keeping it simple when it comes to bringing AI into your workflows. “As we evolve, adopting AI is a necessity to an extent. But we need to be extremely tactical when we adopt it. We need to pick a process, a piece of equipment, or a singular problem and come up with a singular solution,” Daniel says. “Trying to implement a grand, everything-automated, Star Trek interface and maintenance plan is not going to happen unless you have infinite resources.”

In other words, rushing blindly into AI can create its own trap: investing in solutions that teams won’t trust or technology your facility isn’t prepared for. Your team’s success with AI hinges not on rapid adoption, but on being thoughtful about implementation and finding specific, practical ways to use AI technology in your organization. 

Want to learn more about the challenges facing maintenance teams, and the strategies organizations are using to overcome them in 2025? Download the full State of Industrial Maintenance report.