You can now ask your machines about their health
23 September 2026 
A Finnish start-up that specialises in industrial condition monitoring has developed a system that allows maintenance and reliability teams to ask questions about rotating machine health in their own words, and to get an expert analysis and maintenance recommendations in response – along with the reasoning behind them.
The “AI colleague” conversational interface for Rotomate‘s condition-monitoring engine is already being used by the Finnish forest industry group Metsä, the steelmaker SSAB, and the copper producer Aurubis, among others. In these applications, the time spent on manual condition-monitoring tasks has fallen by up to 87%.
Many industrial plants have years of accumulated condition-monitoring data, but there are rarely enough specialists to interpret it all, Rotomate says. Vibration analysts are scarce, their expertise takes years to build, and a single analyst is often responsible for hundreds of machines. If a critical signal is missed, and a machine fails, it can cause nearly €1m in lost output in a single shift (using data from ABB’s 2023 Value of Reliability survey).
Rotomate’s AI colleague works through machine data is a similar way to an experienced reliability engineer, looking at trends, fault frequencies, components and machine history. It understands the plant’s context and shows the evidence behind every conclusion.
Rotomate suggests that its development means that expert-level condition monitoring is no longer reserved for large plants with in-house specialists; smaller sites can get the same up-to-date picture of their machines. Whereas previously all questions had to go through an analyst, now anyone on a maintenance team can ask for a recommendation.
However, Rotomate argues, the specialist’s job does not disappear. It changes. Based on customer applications, the time spent on manual condition-monitoring tasks falls by up to 87%, and one analyst can cover many more machines.
“Traditional condition-monitoring software raises an alert and leaves the interpretation to an engineer,” explains Rotomate’s co-founder and CEO, Mikko Kuusisto. The AI colleague “analyses the root cause and recommends what to do. Now you can also ask it follow-up questions in plain language – the way you would talk a problem through with an experienced colleague. This is a big shift for the industry: how well you know the condition of your machines no longer depends on how many specialists you happen to have on site.”
“The conversation about generative AI in reliability is still mostly theory and chatbot pilots,” adds Rotomate’s other founder, and CTO, Dr Jesse Miettinen. “For us, it is in daily use at customer sites. Our AI colleague is not a chat layer on top of alerts. Instead, it reasons directly from the machine’s measurement data, process variables and maintenance history, and shows what its answer is based on.”
Petri Sillanpää, a condition monitoring specialist at Metsä, reports that the group is using the AI colleague in its maintenance work every day. “Recently it flagged a developing bearing fault on a slowly rotating machine that threshold-based monitoring had not picked up. When something comes up, I ask it directly what the finding is based on and how urgent it is, which helps me decide what to do.”
Helsinki-based Rotomate, founded in 2024, has a team of ten people. Earlier this year, it raised €2.1m in pre-seed funding.
Potential users can try the AI colleague free of charge on their own data.
Rotomate: LinkedIn
