At ProveIt! 2026, CESMII and an extraordinary coalition of industry partners unveiled the i3X™ Open API — live, working, and ready for industry.
There’s no shortage of visions for the future of industrial data. Presentations, white papers, and roadmaps abound. But at the Day 4 keynote of the ProveIt! Conference, CESMII’s John Dyck and Jonathan Wise — alongside an extraordinary coalition of industry collaborators — did something different.
They showed it working. In real time. On stage.
“This wasn’t a slide deck. It wasn’t a future-state concept. It was live. It worked.
What Was Demonstrated
The team unveiled a practical, functioning model of the i3X Open API — a single, open, and scalable framework designed to power self-aware industrial infrastructure built for both humans and agentic AI.
Each collaborating partner progressively integrated their own solutions into an i3X-enabled environment. The result: data, information, and operational context became seamlessly available — not just across vendor platforms, but also to a free external i3X client. No proprietary lock-in. No translation layers. Just shared rules, open architecture, and real interoperability.
This is exactly the kind of breakthrough manufacturers have been demanding, and two of them joined the stage to say so in person: Matthew Parris from GE Appliances (a Haier company and Smart Manufacturing Executive Council member) and Anthony Huffman from Georgia-Pacific — both vocal champions of openness and standards in manufacturing technology.
The Team That Made It Happen
This milestone was only possible because of the commitment and collaboration of a remarkable group of technology partners, each of whom integrated their solutions into a live i3X environment on stage:
- John Dyck and Jonathan Wise (CESMII)
- Craig Egan (ACE Technologies)
- Travis Cox (Inductive Automation)
- Graeme Welton (Flow Software)
- Aron Semle (HighByte)
- Scott Robertson (AWS)
- Caleb Eastman & Todd Malone (Siemens)
On stage representing the manufacturer perspective:
Why This Matters
For years, the industrial world has struggled with fragmentation — proprietary data formats, siloed systems, and costly integration projects that drain resources without creating lasting value. The vision of a truly interoperable industrial ecosystem has remained just that: a vision.
The i3X Open API changes the equation. By establishing simple, shared rules and a single open API, it creates the foundation for infrastructure that can serve human operators and agentic AI systems alike — without forcing manufacturers to choose one vendor ecosystem over another.
When manufacturers and vendors align around shared standards, breakthroughs follow. That’s not a slogan. It’s what happened at ProveIt!.
This Milestone Belongs to the CESMII Community
CESMII exists to accelerate the adoption of smart manufacturing — and that means more than building tools. It means convening the right people, aligning around shared goals, and doing the hard work of making openness real. The ProveIt! demonstration is proof that this community is delivering.
To every manufacturer who has pushed for interoperability, every technology provider who committed to open standards, and every innovator willing to collaborate across traditional competitive boundaries: this is your milestone too.
Learn more: i3X.dev
About CESMII
CESMII – the Smart Manufacturing Institute – has a total current investment commitment of $201M from Department of Energy funding and public/private partnership contributions, with a mandate to create a more competitive manufacturing environment here in the US through advanced sensing, analytics, modeling, control and platforms. CESMII is one of 18 Manufacturing USA institutes on this mission to increase manufacturing productivity, global competitiveness, and reinvestment by increasing energy productivity, improving economic performance and raising workforce capacity. University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is the program and administrative home of CESMII. For more information about CESMII, its history and Smart Manufacturing, visit cesmii.org.