Tata Steel expands Google Cloud AI rollout across plants

Tata Steel has expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to deploy agentic artificial intelligence across its global operations, launching more than 300 specialised AI agents in the past nine months.

The rollout spans manufacturing, maintenance, finance, procurement, human resources and customer service. Built on Google Cloud's technology stack, the system is part of a company-wide AI strategy aimed at linking data, workflows and internal decision-making.

The steelmaker's push centres on two internal platforms. The first, Zen AI, is a low-code system that lets employees, including software developers and frontline managers, build and deploy their own AI agents without needing data science expertise.

Zen AI is connected to Tata Steel's consolidated data architecture on Google Cloud and draws on both structured operational data and unstructured information, including videos and documents. This has enabled teams across the business to create AI tools for specific operational and business tasks.

The second platform, the Tata Steel Digital Assistant, serves as a single internal interface for querying information across public data, enterprise systems and user-owned files such as spreadsheets, PDFs and call recordings. It allows employees to combine market signals with internal records when making decisions on supply chains, operations and commercial activity.

Wider use

Tata Steel outlined several areas where the agents are already in use. In human resources, the Tata Steel Digital Assistant now helps the internal helpdesk resolve more than 70% of routine employee tickets autonomously, according to the company.

Business process agents are also being used for invoice processing, goods and services tax classifications, and contract analysis, taking over repetitive administrative work that would otherwise be handled manually.

On the industrial side, Tata Steel is using AI to monitor safety procedures on the shop floor. A system called Safety EyeQ analyses live video feeds in high-risk areas to identify hazards such as moving heavy equipment, proximity to hot material and deviations from standard operating procedures, then sends alerts for corrective action.

Another group of agents, known as Asset Sphere, assesses equipment health and supports maintenance planning in an effort to reduce unplanned downtime. The same AI approach is also being applied in customer service, where complaint materials, including images, are analysed to identify defects and route cases to the relevant teams.

According to Tata Steel, this has cut average customer complaint turnaround times by 50%.

Data strategy

The programme reflects a broader shift among manufacturers towards applying generative AI and automation to large operational datasets rather than limiting AI to isolated pilot projects. For industrial groups such as Tata Steel, which operate across plants, supply chains and back-office systems, the challenge is often less about access to models than about integrating fragmented information and setting common rules for deployment.

Tata Steel said its earlier decision to build a consolidated data architecture on Google Cloud created a foundation for expanding AI use across the organisation. It also said its infrastructure runs on Google Cloud Run, allowing systems to handle fluctuating demand while maintaining governance over model selection and deployment.

Google Cloud said Tata Steel's AI estate has access to more than 200 models through its AI agent platform. The company is using Google's Gemini and PaliGemma models for multimodal tasks that combine language and image analysis, particularly in factory safety and complaint handling.

Tata Steel is one of the world's larger steel producers, with annual crude steel capacity of 35 million tonnes and operations across five continents. The group reported consolidated turnover of about USD $26 billion in the financial year to the end of March 2025 and employs more than 76,000 people.

Manufacturing groups have increasingly turned to AI tools to improve uptime, reduce response times and automate office functions, but large-scale deployment across industrial environments remains relatively uncommon because of integration, governance and workforce adoption challenges. Tata Steel and Google Cloud are presenting the project as a broad operational rollout rather than a narrow technology trial.

"Working with Google Cloud has allowed us to turn AI from a technical experiment into a specialized partner for every employee. This isn't just about new tools; it's about a continuous engine of execution that enables our people to act on insights instantly. From predicting asset maintenance to reducing customer response times, we are using agentic AI to simplify the most complex parts of our business and drive execution at an entirely new scale," said Jayanta Banerjee, Chief Information Officer, Tata Steel.

Google Cloud described the deployment as unusual in its scale for an industrial company.

"While many industrial players are still navigating the complexities of digital transformation, Tata Steel has moved at unprecedented speed to deploy AI at a scale few in the industry have achieved. Their success demonstrates what is possible when an organization anchors its strategy in a unified AI and data ecosystem. By creating a new blueprint for autonomous business processes at scale, Tata Steel has demonstrated that the synergy between a unified data cloud and generative AI is the key to turning industrial complexity into a distinct, data-driven competitive edge," said Sashi Sreedharan, Managing Director, Google Cloud India.