Ecolab Chief Digital Officer Kevin Doyle is transforming the century-old industrial company through a comprehensive digital strategy that combines AI, IoT, and data analytics to serve both internal operations and customers. Under his leadership, Ecolab Digital has developed everything from AI-powered dish machine diagnostics to predictive analytics for waterborne pathogen detection, while creating new subscription-based revenue streams that move beyond the company’s traditional chemical and equipment sales model.
What you should know: Ecolab Digital represents a strategic merger of the company’s commercial digital solutions and IT teams, designed to leverage technology for both internal efficiency and customer differentiation.
• The unified organization supports 48,000 employees globally while serving customers across water treatment, infection prevention, and industrial automation sectors.
• Doyle’s team operates from a cloud-based platform called “Ecolab 3D” that transforms real-world data into actionable insights for retail, hospitality, and industrial water applications.
• Digital innovations include digital twins for data centers and food retail facilities, alongside AI systems that detect Legionella and other waterborne pathogens.
Empowering the field force: A major focus involves equipping Ecolab’s 28,000 field personnel with AI-powered tools that break down knowledge silos across global operations.
• “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,” Doyle explained. “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.”
• The AI system identifies successful solutions from one region and suggests them to field teams facing similar challenges elsewhere.
• These tools help field personnel “identify, deliver and quantify value in customer environments” more effectively.
New revenue models: Ecolab has developed subscription-based offerings that integrate software, hardware, and support services, moving beyond traditional product sales.
• The company uses consumption-based pricing similar to cloud providers, where customers pay based on actual usage rather than fixed fees.
• “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.
• This approach focuses on value-based outcomes through measurable impacts like water conservation, energy efficiency, and reduced operational downtime.
Internal digital transformation: Ecolab applies the same innovations it develops for customers to its own supply chain and manufacturing operations.
• The company is enhancing ERP, transportation, and quality systems with AI and data analytics.
• “We’re doing design sessions at the operations levels to understand processes that we might improve quality through vision control or vision AI,” Doyle noted.
• Internal digitization serves as validation for customer offerings, allowing the company to “validate the offering is going to create the value we expect” before market launch.
Innovation methodology: Doyle’s team uses a collaborative, cross-functional approach that brings together engineers, developers, AI specialists, and business experts.
• “Bring me someone from R&D, from the field, from marketing, from finance,” Doyle said about his innovation sessions.
• Teams operate in rapid-prototyping pods using design thinking processes rather than traditional PowerPoint presentations.
• With generative and agentic AI, the team can now launch applications in days instead of months.
What they’re saying: Doyle emphasizes the importance of practical innovation over theoretical concepts.
• “You can’t PowerPoint people to death in the digital space,” he said. “A lot of people can create pretty PowerPoints, but can you turn that into technology that’s going to be valuable?”
• “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 explained. “And then we do a rapid iteration.”
• “[We are] coming to them in a different way through insights than maybe in the historic sense of purely chemicals or equipment,” Doyle added about the company’s evolving customer approach.
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