Strategic Partnerships for AI-based Water Innovations
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A guest article by Dr. Waqaas Rehman
The partnership between Wilo and InstaDeep unites in-depth water expertise with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. Through the combination of simulation and AI, jointly developed solutions enable efficient management of complex water supply networks, improving operational reliability and supporting sustainable infrastructure for both industrial and urban applications.
Industrial and infrastructural systems are now more interconnected than ever, and with each additional interface, complexity continues to grow. For organisations, this means decisions must be made under uncertainty, increasing time pressure, and often competing objectives. Traditional optimisation approaches, or legacy rule-based systems, quickly reach their limits in such settings, and “Trial and error” is simply not an option in critical operational environments.
Dr. Waqaas Rehman is Head of Strategic Partnerships at InstaDeep, where he shapes
the company’s positioning at the intersection of AI and industrial optimisation. As a leading voice for advancing AI in Germany and Europe, he is establishing a bridge between innovation and implementation – with a focus on operational excellence and AI-powered product development in a number of different industries. Rehman holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Oxford. He initially invested in InstaDeep, together with Google, and later joined the company to support its growth.
Reinforcement Learning (RL), an AI methodology that dynamically adapts to changing conditions, addresses these challenges. Rather than following fixed rules, an RL system continuously learns from experience: it identifies patterns, evaluates decisions in context, and improves its performance with each iteration. This makes RL particularly effective in operational domains where multiple objectives must be balanced simultaneously, such as energy efficiency, system resilience, and resource conservation. However, true transformation does not arise from the use of intelligent algorithms alone. It requires the interplay of technology, data quality, domain expertise, and a deep understanding of real-world operating conditions. Only when these elements work together can AI realise its full potential, and become a strategic lever for sustainable, intelligent water and infrastructure systems.
Global AI Expertise
InstaDeep, founded in 2014, develops AI-driven decision-making systems for complex enterprise environments. Originating in Tunisia as a research-focused organisation, the company has since grown into a global AI partner, specialising in translating advanced machine intelligence into robust product solutions that operate reliably at scale.
As an NVIDIA AI Elite Partner, InstaDeep works across a range of industries, including logistics, manufacturing, electronics, and the life sciences. Internally, the company has established a tight feedback loop between research and application teams to ensure that innovation remains closely aligned with real-world operational challenges.
InstaDeep’s contributions to RL have been recognised at NeurIPS, one of the world’s leading international machine-learning conferences, where advances in AI theory and applied systems are rigorously peer-reviewed by the global research community.
Industrial Optimisation at Scale
At the core of InstaDeep’s industrial work is the ability to develop AI systems that perform effectively in demanding operational environments, from transport networks to large-scale infrastructure. This capability has been demonstrated in high-profile application areas, including projects in rail networks and airport operations, where planning must account for variability, infrastructural constraints, and unexpected disruptions, often under tight time constraints.
Similar challenges arise in the optimisation of power grids, where identifying effective measures to minimise network congestion is highly complex. This is particularly true when decisions must be computed within tight operational time windows.
In this context, InstaDeep has enabled grid operators to receive timely, actionable recommendations that can be implemented within the real-world constraints of a control-room environment, by training AI agents to learn when and how to make topology adjustments rather than relying on manual, computationally intensive search procedures.
“What distinguishes us is that we cover the full vertical of AI, from developing new algorithms to the technical capability to deploy these systems at scale in a high-performance computing setting. We’ve refined this expertise across two main domains: biology and industrial optimisation.”
Strategic Partnership
The collaboration between Wilo and InstaDeep arose from Wilo’s need to make complex water infrastructures more reliable and efficient through simulation and AI. InstaDeep contributes specialised expertise in reinforcement learning and in the development of simulation environments, which integrate effectively with Wilo’s deep physical domain knowledge. Together, we are developing AI-driven solutions that reduce operational burden and support the safe and sustainable function of water systems worldwide.
This collaboration is giving rise to a flexible simulation and optimisation platform capable of supporting a wide range of customer environments, from football stadiums to complex industrial operations. Our shared objective is to transform the way complex water networks are managed. Rather than relying on manually configured, isolated processes, a data-driven approach enables holistic optimisation of water networks, regardless of their size or complexity. Thus, the approach is completely in line with Wilo's WATER AI strategy.
With DeepForge, InstaDeep’s AI platform, Wilo connects its IoT platform to InstaDeep’s advanced AI capabilities. This allows Wilo to develop AI agents and new operational strategies safely in simulation first, and then deploy them in a targeted manner to real-world water networks, delivering clear added value for Wilo’s customers.
By combining Wilo’s water expertise with InstaDeep’s AI knowledge, solutions emerge in which AI agents can make autonomous decisions, identify risks at an early stage, and respond to them independently. In doing so, they contribute to stable and secure operations, increase efficiency, and enable a more sustainable use of water resources. Together, Wilo and InstaDeep are paving the way for a forward-looking, intelligent water infrastructure that brings together innovation, safety, and sustainability.
