Today, many technologies are coming together to create a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the age of autonomy or Fourth Industrial Revolution. In this new age, physical spaces and objects have become intelligent and connected. In the same way, electronic trading platforms talk to each other at sub-millisecond transactions, intelligent objects, and robots operate at the same speed and communicate with intelligent spaces and cloud-based systems in real-time, updating augmented humans and enabling real-time businesses, improving productivity, and providing more agility and resiliency while being sustainable.Â
Once fully implemented, the age of autonomy will power resilient and responsive communities, improve supply chains, and enable safer roads and smarter cities, creating inclusive innovation ecosystems leveraging real-time information to design new interactions.
If this vision seems far away, the leading company implements part of it already. For example, Kroger partners with NVidia to optimize the efficiencies of their store through the use of digital twins updated in real-time with customer data. Amazon is now detecting abnormal behavior in industrial machinery, and reducing unplanned downtime at fulfillment centers by nearly 70 percent, uses robots to improve efficiency with a 20 percent increase in productivity, and augments workers to locate any item of interest. Amazon not only aims at same-day delivery but does it with Zero Carbon Certified fulfillment centers or logistics facilities.
The Age of Autonomy is possible because we can place today sensors and cameras everywhere, collect and process cost effectively data through real-time and IoT-enabled, Cloud standard-based, distributed, and interoperable platforms. The information collected can update in real-time 3D representations coming from CAD systems creating digital twins. Data teams analyze data coming from the digital twins with simulation to optimize physical investments and create and update Artificial Intelligence models used to automate the interactions between robots and intelligent spaces leveraging machine to machine transactions.Â
With 1 trillion connected things and 100 times more data created and processed every year, energy consumption will significantly go up and sustainability needs to be a key criterion in addition to ROI, latency, and data sovereignty for any project being evaluated.Â
The real time enterprise will not occur in a vacuum and real time information will have to flow across supply chains and ecosystems through data spaces. Data will need to be trustworthy and provided with the right level of information for it to be usable. Right now, companies are not comfortable with their data. Only 5 percent of executives trust their data, and the basic infrastructure is not even in place to even start sharing data reliably. Foundations like Gaia-X are starting to build the infrastructure necessary to share data responsibly while maintaining sovereignty .Â
Therein lies the challenge with the market: understanding how to navigate through this paradigm shift, and with it, the fact that we are just on the surface of this Fourth Industrial Revolution.Â
Tracking the state of machines and interactions between machines and augmented humans in real-time and reacting quickly to those interactions leveraging simulation and AI needs to be at the core of information systems. The tech platform of the future must enable these interactions and be intelligent as well. The concepts and technologies where Topio leads in business and market intel are key to where industry is going: data sovereignty, data responsibility, data exchanges, data spaces, digital twins, and the ecosystem of entities built on top of this intelligent infrastructure, all of which hinge on edge computing.
This guest post is by Philippe Cases, CEO and Co-Founder of Topio Networks. Topio Networks is an industry catalyst accelerating the formation markets by creating communities and has a community of 1.2 million professionals dedicated to making the business of connected things a reality. In addition to running the company, Cases specializes in Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, Mobility and Smart Cities by authoring or coauthoring landscapes in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Mobility (connected cars and automated vehicles). He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences and run the weekly readwrite labs webinar.
