Now three months after the groundbreaking launch of Cognite Flows™ in May 2026, we’ve been thrilled to see the positive response from both the analyst community and our customers. Designed to help the everyday “industrial heroes” keep operations running smoothly with more insights and automation, Cognite Flows is already changing how certain tedious work gets done on the factory floor. In this blog, we’ll break down 6 key use cases where Flows is making a significant difference in real-life customer settings.
Improving operations dashboards
Today, operators rely on dashboards for all sorts of updates: production volumes, equipment status, etc. But often these dashboards don’t contain all the relevant information or are too inflexible to adapt over time without a lot of work.
To fix this, customers are leveraging the Operations Dashboard Flows app that consolidates operational data from SAP, IMPACT, LIMS, PCMS, and OSI/PI (plus CDF-hosted AI shift summaries) into a single leadership dashboard of unit performance, reliability, safety, quality, and constraint status. Already, these operators are seeing value from shortening the time it takes to prepare reports by over 25%, reducing response time to process deviations by 10%, and other measurable improvements in throughput, reduced downtime, quality, and overall productivity.
Streamlining Root Cause Analysis
Any engineer who has done an RCA knows how complicated and time-consuming it can be to get all the information in one place for sophisticated, high-stakes analysis. Often, the overall process can take weeks and involve many sets of stakeholders. With the Asset RCA Flows app, customers have been able to shorten the time it takes to get to the first draft of an RCA to under 30 minutes with more automation.
Rather than doing everything by hand, an engineer can select an asset or start from a maintenance notification, leverage an agent to gather the right evidence, review an ISO 14224-oriented draft with a live cause map walk, and then export the analysis into a PDF or Industrial Canvas. This greatly simplifies the process and leads to more collaboration and a faster time to root cause.
Automating work package generation
Translating a reported equipment issue or scheduled task into an execution-ready package with the right information requires much of the same data-gathering processes as the above - often taking significant time and needing a clear understanding of the problem and issue at hand. The scope of work needs to be clear, materials and parts need to be identified and reserved, and the right labor and skills need to be scheduled.
This Work Package Generator Flows app significantly reduces time and effort in assembling maintenance work packages so that engineers can spend their time on higher-value work. By gathering data automatically, standardizing outputs, and improving consistency, work package generation can be largely automated while maintaining compliance and improving the safety and quality of work.
Classifying work orders
Today, classifying work orders is often handled manually and depends on correctly interpreting a lot of nuanced information. Some organizations have a lot of granular failure codes, which can overwhelm decision-making, while too few codes might be too vague. Therefore, the decisions need to be made based on other context from the issue.
With the Work Order Classifier Flows app, operators are reducing the time to classify a single work order to seconds, both taking into account unstructured reliability data and tagging it appropriately to the issue. Not only does this mean that the workflow is handled more effectively, but operators are also able to find maintenance and repair patterns that might have been overlooked.
Summarizing operations
Maintaining reliable operations across shifts depends on effective handover of statuses and information. But documenting and sharing context on new or ongoing events can be inconsistent depending on the team’s expertise and available bandwidth at the time of handover.
The Operations Summarizer Flows app generates personalized Ops summaries from the shift that can be delivered via audio, text, or visual formats based on user preference. Already, operators are reporting a decrease in human errors, better meeting quality and focus, and a reduction in time for handover by over 50%.
Generating monthly risk reports
Today, it can still take a lot of time and effort to generate risk reports. And when it comes to all the other operator priorities at a plant, this critical task can take a back seat. It still requires sifting through engineering data and other unstructured information in order to create a risk analysis and report.
The Blueprint Flows app turns static engineering diagrams (P&IDs, PDFs) into live operational dashboards and risk reports that can be generated in less than half an hour. Users can place shapes on the diagram linked to CDF assets and time series, author rule groups/bundles that evaluate integrity and corrosion conditions against live CDF data, and generate AI-written analysis reports.
Deploy in days, scale effortlessly
There’s a common thread in all of these Flows apps: they solve the complex, time-consuming tasks of finding the right data and processing it into more useful, domain-specific formats. This saves time, improves quality, and keeps engineers focused on more critical work. It’s also a great example of how AI can augment well-established workflows rather than reinvent the wheel or cause unnecessary disruption. This is all made possible (and scalable) by Cognite’s Industrial AI and Data platform that enables AI with industry-leading data contextualization.
There’s only one more question: what time-intensive operational challenge should we tackle next with Cognite Flows?