We find ourselves in an a pivotal era in technology where things we’ve been promised for years like Augmented Reality, advanced 3D printing, artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles are becoming a reality (albeit not necessarily in the forms we’d like them yet, or in all locations or price points.) As technology evolves, technologists across disciplines and industries are sharing knowledge and research, leading to even more discoveries and cross practice convergence.
Artificial Intelligence
It’s easy to see AI as something of a party trick, (like the dog/muffin pic), a killer robot (not such a great party as we thought) or a buzzword that rolls off the tongue of a startup CEO like something from a checklist. But in reality, Artificial Intelligence has developed to achieve a wide range of capabilities from image recognition to language processing and data analysis. It enables machines to make decisions and deductive reasoning faster than humans. It creates a extra layer on what IoT can achieve, almost an inter-dependence, such as in the growth of AI-powered analytics platforms for the enterprise market and the enablement of predictive and prescriptive analytics and adaptive/continuous analytics. Each year, what it makes possible, succeeds that of the proceeding ten years. We can expect that AI will lay the foundation for an acceleration in innovation over the next few years, boosting some sectors of the economy and completely restricting some industries. While programmers still control the capabilities of AI at present, this may not be the case forever.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
Few could doubt the hype of VR and AR. Our love affair of Pokemon Go may have waned but it remains an incredibly profitable enterprise and shows that there’s serious money to be made in AR. Only this week augmented reality startup Magic Leap raised $461 million from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment arm bringing their total funding to date to $2.3 billion -without having even released a product.
It might not possess the allure of gaming but AR is enjoying a quiet disruption within Connected Industry. For example, in the elevator service industry, ThyssenKrupp utilizes Microsoft’s HoloLens technology, enabling over 24,000 of the company’s service technicians to do their jobs more safely and efficiently, and keep people and cities moving better than ever before. Using HoloLens, service technicians can visualize and identify problems with elevators ahead of a job, and have remote, hands-free access to technical and expert information when onsite – all resulting in significant savings in time and stress. Field trials have already shown that a service maintenance intervention can be done up to four times faster.
Blockchain technologies
It hard to separate the financial news of ICOs and Bitcoin from blockchain technologies, but we see the underlying Distributed Ledger Technology as the infrastructure for a compelling range of solutions to problems that have plagued connected industries for decades, like product authenticity, copyright, cyber-security, as well as removing obstacles to data monetization and M2M micropayments.