Abstract: A distributed Industrial Virtual Assistant (IVA) platform and method that that allows operational staff at industrial facilities to have natural language conversations with an IVA to obtain information about, and to control operations of, industrial facilities. For each facility, the IVA platform contains a facilities asset database, one or more domain-specific knowledge databases, a natural language processing engine, and machine learning algorithms for both knowledge domains and context which update the domain-specific knowledge databases based on continuing interactions with operational staff over time. The IVA platform is capable of generating user-specific and device-specific IVA instances that can be queried by voice or text independently of the platform but can connect to the platform to update the databases based on new knowledge, exceptions, and incidents.