Thomas Debruyne

Thomas Debruyne did not set out to be a digital-water person, and the way he tells it, he did not really set out to be in Australia either. He studied chemistry and process engineering at CPE Lyon in France, started his career as a project engineer at the filtration company Pall Corporation in Paris, and then made a move that had nothing to do with his career: his wife is Australian, he had met her while studying in Adelaide back in 2006, and in 2010 the two of them decided to settle in Melbourne. He joined Veolia the year after and, in his own words, grew through different positions locally, from key account management and speciality-chemicals sales into the part of the business everyone was starting to call digital.

Thomas Debruyne is careful about that word, and it is the most useful thing he says. Digital, he points out, could mean pretty much everything and almost nothing at the same time, and it had become a buzzword that was rarely deployed correctly. His own definition is refreshingly unglamorous: at Veolia Water Technologies the DNA is process expertise, not software, and the company never set out to become a digital-services provider. What digital actually does, in his telling, is let a process company deliver what it already knows (how to run the biology in a treatment plant) in a better, cheaper, more efficient way. He puts the split at roughly 90% old-fashioned expertise, with the connected layer on top making that expertise easier to support and easier for the client to run.

Thomas Debruyne built that thinking around AquaVista, the cloud platform from Veolia's Krüger arm that organises digital water technology into four bricks, Portal, Insight, Assist and Plant, running from simple remote monitoring all the way up to AI that tunes the biological treatment in real time. The point of the most advanced tier is not a dashboard, it is capacity: an algorithm refines the calculation of the biology using cloud computing, which lets a plant treat more water and spend less on energy and chemicals, while the local controller stays in place as a fail-safe. The clever bit, for an industry that hates spending money on concrete, is that you defer capital expenditure instead of building a bigger plant.

Thomas Debruyne has the case study to make that concrete, and it is the reason the episode is called what it is. At BlueKolding, a utility in Kolding, Denmark, that Veolia's Krüger had been connected to for the better part of two decades, running the plant through AquaVista delivered a stack of numbers he reels off without much drama: nitrogen down 27%, chemical use down 46%, energy down 23%, and hydraulic capacity up 80%, with sewer overflows cut by 83% once they took a combined network-and-plant view. An 80% jump in hydraulic capacity is, near enough, almost doubling what the plant can take, which is a lot of headroom to find inside a system you already own.

Thomas Debruyne is also clear-eyed about why this is hard to sell, and it is not the technology. The water market, he says, is one of the most conservative he knows, so even when the numbers make sense it can be a challenge to get a utility to buy software-as-a-service rather than a reassuringly solid concrete upgrade. He has since carried that perspective across the industry: after Veolia he spent three years at the engineering firm GHD leading water-technology integration across Asia Pacific and co-running a regional working group on energy efficiency and decarbonisation, and in late 2025 he moved to SUEZ as its digital integration lead for Australia and New Zealand. The job title keeps changing; the argument he has been making since at least 2020 does not.

“The water market is one of the most conservative markets I know. So it could be a challenge sometimes to basically position the solution even if the numbers make sense.”

Thomas Debruyne is, in short, the person who has spent a decade translating between the engineers who run water plants and the software that could run them better, which in one of the world's most cautious industries is a more useful skill than it sounds.