As veteran technicians retire and unplanned downtime costs an estimated $1 trillion a year, Bridgera bets on agents that capture institutional knowledge and act on it before it walks out the door

RALEIGH, N.C., Aug. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Bridgera, an operational technology transformation company connecting the physical and digital sides of asset-intensive operations with intelligent automation, today said the next maintenance crisis will be driven less by machine failure than by knowledge loss. As industries face a wave of retirements and more than $1 trillion in annual downtime costs, organizations risk losing the expertise that keeps critical assets and processes running. Bridgera’s proprietary ARC AI agents are designed to change that equation by capturing that institutional knowledge, analyzing live operational signals, and acting within client-defined guardrails to improve reliability, reduce risk, and scale expert decision-making.

To accelerate that effort, Bridgera has appointed Ryan Oettinger as Chief Revenue Officer. Oettinger brings 25 years of industry experience and will lead go-to-market growth as agentic AI adoption increases across oil and gas, fuel distribution, convenience retail, industrial manufacturing, OEM, and supply chain markets. “Most of what is called AI in this category still stops at telling operators something is wrong,” Oettinger said. “Bridgera’s ARC agents go further. They determine what should happen next and make it happen, automatically.”

Ask most industrial executives what their AI investment actually gave them, and the honest answer is a better view of the problem – not a solution to it. “The gap between visibility, value, and action is what we are solving,” said Madhu Modugu, Co-founder and CEO, Bridgera. “Bridgera’s ARC AI agents do what platforms and dashboards never could: correlate signals across systems, diagnose actual causes, and act automatically – before the fine, the outage, or the spoiled batch happens.”

“The most valuable asset in any operation isn’t code or data, it’s the knowledge and judgment people accumulate over years of experience. Bridgera has been a trusted technology partner throughout our digital transformation, helping us modernize core systems, strengthen our data foundation, and automate manual processes that used to slow our teams down,” said Tiffany Glass, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, 1-800-PACK-RAT. “Our results demonstrate the power of operational technology to scale expertise, improve efficiency, and create new opportunities for innovation across the business.”

Bridgera defines its approach as “Predict. Prevent. Perform.” Its Interscope AI engine predicts outcomes by unifying fragmented data from equipment, systems, databases, and vendors. Bridgera’s ARC Agents then correlate those signals, identify likely causes, and prevent failures by performing the right response within the client’s guardrails. Bridgera estimates this closes the loop on 70–80% of routine operational decisions while keeping people in control of higher-risk exceptions.

About Bridgera

Bridgera is an operational technology transformation company that helps asset-intensive businesses connect equipment, data, and legacy systems with automated intelligence. For more than 15 years, Bridgera has helped companies reduce downtime, lower costs, and improve operational reliability by turning disconnected systems and manual processes into connected, AI-enabled operations. Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, Bridgera has offices across the U.S. and India.

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SOURCE Bridgera