Innovation Unleashed at ICC 2026

Long time COPA partner, Inductive Automation, had its Ignition Community Conference (ICC) in Sacramento, CA on September 22nd thru 24th, 2026. This is their 14th year and the first time it was at this venue because of the overwhelming amount of interest in attending.

The theme, Innovation Unleashed, delivered on that promise with a mix of exciting releases, a yearly release cycle, showcasing that the community has built, and a refreshing doubling down on people.

While all that is impressive, what we find even more impressive is that people attending for the first time were 60% of the audience. We think this shows two important things.

First, an open approach to your platform where anyone can build on top of it, is a driver of growth.

Second, from a COPA perspective, it's a model for how Open Process Automation can build its own ecosystem to support those that believe, like COPA and Inductive Automation do, that standards based, open systems lead to long term growth.

The Yearly Release Cycle

The challenge any company faces is how to focus a team and a community on what's important. Too often, at least early on, companies tend to release early and often. That ends up working out fine when you're building an ecosystem around your product.

Once that's built, the more sustainable (and focusing) is to commit to a regular release cycle that allows the entire ecosystem to be able to plan and absorb all the goodness.

Open Process Automation Takes a Bow

What's great about the ICC community is that by definition, they want to build upon open platforms. So, it was a nice surprise that at the Tuesday keynote, COPA was given a shoutout for helping with High Availability in Ignition. Thanks Shah, for the shoutout.

While it's nice to get kudos and show off our brand spanking new logo, the fundamental shift we are seeing is that more and more companies want to get rid of vendor lock-in.

AI That Works with and for You

Two important AI announcements came out of ICC26. The first being that agents or Catalyst Assistants will be embedded into Ignition and the MCP promise of last year will be available, via User-Defined Agents, in Ignition 2027 but will require an upgrade.

That all seems like a reasonable and rational approach given that some folks won't want full blown AI and others will want to aggressively connect to their workflows.

Showcasing the Amazing Community

One thing that was repeated over and over again was the amazing community that has been built around Ignition: 5,581 integrations to be exact, which is a 15% increase this year.

The discovery showcase was a great place to see some of these things. One that I particularly liked was Avadine.

Their iPOC solution is an ignition-native monitoring & control for pump-off controllers. It captures dynamometer cards, adjusts set-points, issues secure commands, and routes alarms via SMS/voice/email/Teams/Twilio.

Why this is amazing is that they are a system integrator, and this is their first product. This is important because that could have only happened on an open system like Ignition. That's the whole point of an open platform: the freedom to focus on solving problems instead of battling proprietary tools.

A few others from the Discovery Showcase worth knowing about:

• AUTEXOPEN and ASE Global (Oil & Gas, Firebrand winner): A massive Patagonian O&G deployment delivering comprehensive control with Ignition.
• CSE ICON (Oil & Gas): Automated the migration of millions of data points for a large O&G producer. The scale alone makes it notable.
• Nautilus (Data Center): A floating data center running Ignition for control, testing, and the customer-facing interface. Floating. That alone is worth a look.
• Contel Smart Energy (Utilities, Firebrand winner): An urban microgrid keeping a school campus powered and running autonomously.

It was nice to see such a robust Discovery Showcase of all sorts of companies building some stellar solutions on top of Ignition.

People First Focus

In a world where companies are replacing people with AI, it's refreshing to hear a company focus more and more on people. This came through in the Community keynote with a new department called Client Services, expansion into Australia, and an East Coast office in Maryland.

Automation might be about using technology to make things better, faster, or cheaper, but the folks that do the work and support those that do it, are still people. In reality, no amount of AI will change that.

Of course, AI will make people better, do their work faster, and deliver more value at a cheaper price but in Industrial Automation, it's still going to require a human-in-the-loop to make sure it works and is safe.

Architecting the Future of OT

One of the things we were excited to participate in was a panel on architecting the future of OT with co-leader of COPA (and CEO of CPLANE) Bob Hagenau.

Bob has been around for so long, that they only had to put his first name on the slide.

The great thing about the panel was that it talked about standards like OPC-UA, MQTT, and of course, OPA. What we got out of the discussion was that while standards may take a little longer to get adopted, it accelerates innovation.

The ability to be able to build products on a platform of standards allows companies to focus on what they are good at. It also gives end users (e.g. customers) a choice in how they want to implement their systems or products.

The power of choice and competition has always been at the heart of a healthy marketplace, and we applaud Inductive Automation (and everyone at ICC) who believes in that.

Unleashing the Road Ahead

What was exciting about ICC2026 was the energy and optimism that industrial automation is finally going to be able to take advantage of the vast amount of innovation that the rest of the technology sector has been using for decades.

The growth of ICC and Inductive Automation's bold yet grounded approach bodes well for not only the Ignition community but the entire industrial automation ecosystem. The road ahead, to open industrial automation that customers can build great things on, can finally be unleashed.