Copia Automation Announces the Launch of Its AI-Powered Copilot, Supporting the Transformation of How Automation Engineers Engage with Their Coding Workflows

Copia Automation, founded in 2020, is headquartered in the United States and has raised ~US$30 million in funding. It provides manufacturers with an industrial Development and Operations (DevOps) platform that includes industrial code source control, along with automatic backups and disaster recovery. Copia’s Git-based source control product allows operators to gather Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) and other industrial code from multiple sources, and render it in a way that enables Git-based collaboration. This allows multiple engineers to work simultaneously on the same code-base, easily see differences between code versions, and track changes—all serving to streamline the industrial automation coding process. The company announced on November 19 the launch of Copia Copilot, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tool that comprehensively supports engineers’ daily operations. The tool is currently in Beta and accessible for all customers.

Copia Copilot focuses on three main pillars of functionality to empower automation engineers:

1. Code Generation from Scratch: The copilot can generate both ladder logic and structured text to rapidly speed code development projects. This supports new engineers who might not have significant experience in coding specific processes, aiding training processes. Additionally, Copia Copilot can generate code documentation, which is usually a highly time-consuming task that many manufacturers tend to put off doing.
2. Code Modification: Operators can take existing code and modify it; for example, converting traditional ladder logic code to structured text or adding additional steps to routines. This can save engineers significant amounts of time, streamlining automation project workflows. Furthermore, the tool can significantly speed up code-base refactoring, easily updating old code bases to match current company standards.
3. Code Interpretation and Question and Answer (Q&A): The copilot can rapidly summarize and provide overviews of what the given code is doing, supplying a high-level overview with additional specifics on key points of action.

Copia’s new AI copilot represents the valuable type of solution that is needed from technology vendors, providing immediate value and effectively augmenting existing workflows. This is because the industrial automation market currently faces a challenge in recruiting and maintaining enough automation engineers. Industrial DevOps solutions, combined with powerful Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) tools, are essential for augmenting the existing workforce, helping to eliminate repetitive tasks, alongside enabling new workers to get up to speed faster. Overall, the tool allows manufacturing and distribution automation engineering teams to do more, with less.  

Copia addresses two of the main issues raised by manufacturers when deploying new AI tools: data security and explainability. The copilot is pre-trained on an existing foundational model, rather than on customers’ data, maintaining data security for manufacturers. Alongside this, every generation provides an explanation of what the copilot has done, ensuring transparency for the user.

Copia’s solution is not unique to the industrial DevOps market, with Software Defined Automation and Qt offering Factory Agent and a GitHub Copilot integration, respectively. Manufacturers that are considering adopting industrial DevOps tools to support their automation engineering processes or enable their journey toward software-defined automation architectures should make sure to account for the value brought about by new Gen AI tools.