About IO by Cleverdist

Built inside industrial control systems

Cleverdist is a Swiss engineering company that grew up inside industrial control systems. Over a decade in industry, and more than a decade before that at CERN, we have designed, delivered, and supported SCADA and WinCC OA systems across energy, transport, manufacturing, and scientific infrastructure.

Along the way, we have worked across air traffic control, fusion, petrochemical terminals, metro operations, and more. Some projects were massive and mission-critical. Others had to be delivered fast and clean. We know how to do both.

Today, our main product focus is Industrial Operator, an AI system for industrial operations. We continue to support the systems and customers that shaped how we engineer.

From CERN to industry

Before Cleverdist, our founding team spent over a decade at CERN building and operating control systems for large scientific infrastructure. That environment taught us how to engineer for complexity, long lifecycles, and situations where reliability is non-negotiable. It also shaped the research and development culture we still carry today: comfortable with novel problems, rigorous in method, and focused on turning hard ideas into working systems.

In 2015, we brought that discipline into industry. Whether a project is critical, unconventional, or simply needs to be delivered cleanly and on time, that is where we do our best work.

Turning engineering into reusable structure

As our project count grew, the same problem kept showing up: industrial control systems were being rebuilt from scratch too often. The same patterns, the same architectures, the same integration challenges, solved again and again instead of once.

SmartNodes++ started as our answer: a framework that brings ontology, structure, and reuse into WinCC OA engineering. It makes systems easier to maintain, easier to upgrade, and faster to deliver. It became a product early on, used in projects with companies like Siemens ITS, now Yunex Traffic, ITER, and others who needed that same discipline in their own systems.

SmartNodes Anywhere came later, born alongside IO. It takes the same principles beyond WinCC OA, modelling any SCADA system or enterprise interface, and providing the structured context IO uses to reason about operations.

When AI became useful enough

By 2023, generative AI had reached a level where it could be used seriously inside engineering and operations. By then, we already had more than a decade of experience across industrial sectors, together with the control-system knowledge, structured models, and operational context built through years of delivery. We also had the R&D culture and speed needed to adapt quickly as the field moved. What was missing was a reasoning layer that could use that foundation well.

That is when AI became a core direction for Cleverdist, while keeping the same standards for reliability, traceability, and industrial fit that our customers depend on.

What we are building now

Industrial Operator brings together the threads we have been building for years: control-system expertise, ontological engineering, and modern AI reasoning. Already deployed in live industrial environments, IO is designed to understand operations in context, support decisions, and operate within clear governance.

We are advancing IO while standing behind every system we have built. Our SCADA customers are not a separate chapter. They are part of the reason IO exists.