Pieter van Schalkwyk
CEO, XMPro
Pieter van Schalkwyk is the CEO of XMPro and a recognized thought leader in industrial AI and agentic operations. He is an inaugural Digital Twin Consortium Ambassador and a frequent speaker at mining and industrial technology conferences worldwide.
LinkedIn124 posts
Software-Defined Operations Writes the Decision Down for AI Agents
Software-defined operations means the logic behind an operating decision lives in one place in software. Today it is spread across spreadsheets, procedures, control settings, approval routes and the experience of a few senior people.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
How Much Rigor Does Your Operational AI Need?
During workshop sessions with a large oil and gas company, we discussed how different artificial intelligence (AI) models could be used across operational use cases. Some applications allowed room to experiment with frontier models and change models regularly.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Software-Defined Operations: Change How Operations Work
A new book from XMPro CEO Pieter van Schalkwyk. Software-Defined Operations is an architectural pattern that decouples operational decision and coordination logic from applications, automation and infrastructure, so it can be configured, changed and governed through software. 44 pages, free PDF.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
An Ontology Is Not a Graph Database
Why industrial context needs a system of fit-for-purpose data stores, standardized and governed, before an agent can act on it safely.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Who Owns Your Context Layer?
France's intelligence agency dropped a platform it could not itself turn off. Any operator building an industrial context layer faces the same exposure, and the consolidation into OEM stacks makes it urgent. The procurement question has changed from which platform has the best features to: whatever happens to this vendor, what do I still own?
Pieter van Schalkwyk
How Do Agents Make Decisions Under Uncertainty?
An XMPro technical white paper. The decision happens outside the model, in a decision layer — how an operator agent decides under uncertainty on a Sequential Decision Analytics foundation, and why the decision still reproduces exactly.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
288 Years of Research Behind MAGS
The oldest idea in the MAGS codebase was published in 1738. A tour of the 288-year research lineage built into MAGS — every architectural layer traced to the published work it implements, cited at the line of code.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
The Industrial AI Agent Manifesto
The Digital Twin Consortium has published the Industrial AI Agent Manifesto — a governance framework for deploying AI agents in safety-critical industrial environments. Ten engineering laws for trustworthy autonomous operations.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Why Industrial AI Agents Don't Need to "Reason" Like ChatGPT
Industrial AI agents need more than a reasoning model — they need a governed decision architecture. Pieter van Schalkwyk explores XMPro's OODA-inspired Cognitive Decision Loop (ORPA: Observe, Reflect, Plan, Act) that lets MAGS work like virtual operators within bounded authority, leaving an auditable Decision Trace.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
XMPro CEO Pieter van Schalkwyk Speaks at CIIT Mining Conference in Peru on Agentic Operations and Building Trust in Industrial AI
Pieter van Schalkwyk presents on agentic operations and building trust in industrial AI at the CIIT Latam Congress in Lima, Peru.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Beyond OpenClaw: Why Industrial Agents Need Bounded Actuation
Pieter Van Schalkwyk CEO at XMPRO This article originally appeared on XMPro CEO's Linkedin Blog, The Digital Engineer I've worked on autonomous operations for years, back when agents weren't sexy or...
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Sunday Morning Strategy: How I Use AI for Continuous Tactical Calibration
Pieter Van Schalkwyk CEO at XMPRO This article originally appeared on XMPro CEO's Linkedin Blog, The Digital Engineer Sunday morning, February 15, 2026. I'm reading The Australian over coffee when an...
Pieter van Schalkwyk
The 'AI Wants to Kill You' Story Shows Why Architecture Matters More Than Alignment
Pieter Van Schalkwyk CEO at XMPRO This article originally appeared on XMPro CEO's Linkedin Blog, The Digital Engineer Mark Vos 's adversarial testing of an AI assistant made headlines across...
Pieter van Schalkwyk