Ecolab Builds The Future With Data And AI

Ecolab Chief Digital Officer Kevin Doyle has been with the company for 15 years and in his current post for two. He oversees a broad scope, blending traditional CIO responsibilities with a mandate to build innovative data-rich digital products. His team supports both Ecolab’s 48,000 employees and a diverse global customer base, bringing together IT, digital product development and supply chain modernization under one strategic roof.

Ecolab’s mission to make the world cleaner, safer and healthier translates into an expansive portfolio of offerings from water treatment and infection prevention to advanced analytics and industrial automation. “We touch a lot of different areas,” Doyle said. “Pretty broad base of what we’re capable of, but all impactful.” His team drives value creation through data-driven insights, IoT applications and mobile solutions tailored to both internal operations and customer-facing engagements.

Delivering Value Through Ecolab Digital

A recent organizational shift brought Ecolab’s commercial digital solutions group and IT teams together under a single banner: Ecolab Digital. “It was to take advantage of all of the technology, wealth of knowledge and capability that we had, and use it to differentiate, not only for internal operations or our customers, but how we can jointly do that,” Doyle said.

Ecolab Digital delivers a broad array of commercial innovations, including digital twins in data centers and food retail facilities, AI-powered dish machine diagnostics and predictive analytics that detect waterborne pathogens like Legionella. “We cover a lot of different territories,” Doyle explained. “But we have a base platform that we take all of our data into. We call it Ecolab 3D.” This cloud-based infrastructure turns real-world data into insights that drive customer value across sectors such as retail, hospitality and industrial water.

Empowering the Front Lines with Intelligent Tools

While customer-facing innovation remains central, Doyle emphasizes the importance of arming Ecolab’s employees, especially the 28,000 in the field, with modern technologies. “We’re trying to take advantage of the latest trends in technology, [such as]

artificial intelligence and some of these things that are more generative in nature,” he said. These tools aim to elevate how Ecolab personnel identify, deliver and quantify value in customer environments.

A major initiative involves using AI to share knowledge across the global field team. “If you’re in Southeast Asia or southeast Idaho and you’ve got a dairy plant that you’re serving, you might have ideas that never cross paths,” he said. “We’re now surfacing those to people as opportunities to say, ‘have you considered these things?’ They’ve created value for customers in other places.” This approach transforms siloed knowledge into scalable insights, helping the field organization make smarter, faster decisions on the ground.

Monetizing Digital with Subscriptions and Scalable Services

Doyle and his team have also developed new ways to monetize Ecolab’s digital assets. “We really built a strategy around not only our connected devices but the applications and the services that we’re deploying,” he said. This includes subscription-based offerings that integrate software, hardware and support services, creating a new revenue stream for the company.

The model goes beyond device installation to include consumption-based pricing and value-based outcomes. “Much like our cloud providers charge us for the amount of compute that we use, we’re doing similar things for our customers,” Doyle said. The approach reinforces Ecolab’s commitment to delivering measurable impact, whether through water conservation, energy efficiency or operational downtime. “[We are] coming to them in a different way through insights than maybe in the historic sense of purely chemicals or equipment,” he added.

Digitizing the Supply Chain and Harnessing AI

Ecolab’s internal operations have also been transformed through digitization, particularly in the supply chain. Doyle’s team is rethinking how ERP, transportation and quality systems can be enhanced with data and artificial intelligence. “We’re doing design sessions at the operations levels to understand processes that we might improve quality through vision control or vision AI,” he said.

The company applies many of the same innovations it develops for customers to its own facilities. “A lot of those things that we’re delivering for customers are custom applications that we’re developing based on the hundred years of experience that Ecolab has,” Doyle underscored with pride. From predictive maintenance to real-time plant optimization, the internal digitization strategy mirrors the external, allowing Ecolab to “validate the offering is going to create the value we expect” before going to market.

Innovation as a Collaborative Cross-Functional Engine

At the heart of Ecolab’s innovation strategy is a highly collaborative model. Doyle’s team brings together engineers, developers, AI specialists and user-experience designers with subject matter experts from across the business. “Bring me someone from R&D, from the field, from marketing, from finance,” Doyle said. “Then generally we use some form of design thinking process or session where we’re getting a cross-functional group together, collaborating in a highly engaging, highly energized environment.”

The group operates in pods that rapidly prototype new solutions. “You can’t PowerPoint people to death in the digital space,” Doyle emphasized. “A lot of people can create pretty PowerPoints, but can you turn that into technology that’s going to be valuable?” With the help of generative and agentic AI, Doyle’s team now launches apps in days instead of months. “Our innovation program is really about how do we leverage AI, how do we take the data and insights, what problems are we trying to solve for customers,” he said. “And then we do a rapid iteration.”

This blend of heritage and agility, leveraging a century of domain expertise while adopting cutting-edge technology, defines Doyle’s digital playbook. In his hands, innovation is not just about novelty but about continuously renewing how Ecolab serves its customers and employees in a fast-changing world.

Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.