With Edge hardware costs coming down, AI/ML becoming prevalent at the atomic level, and IoT connectivity, Hyper-automation is becoming a thing for manufacturers to increase productivity with optimization.
Today’s supply chain disruptions, labour shortage, and macroeconomic turmoil happening in 2021 and may continue throughout 2022, manufacturers are ready to make aggressive investments to modernize their factories with EdgeAIoT technologies to transform into a “lights-out” factory. However, is EdgeAIoT ready for the challenge?
The answer is yes, it is ready for the challenge because of the mass adoption of IoT in the past 10 years. I am witnessing many manufacturing CIOs inquiring about edgeAIoT as a part of their hyper-automation roadmaps.
What manufacturing CIOs should be doing to embrace edgeAIoT:
- Speak with your cloud provider to see if they have an edge AI on-ramp capabilities. What are the data requirements, data sharing transmission costs and types of training and inference is done in the cloud vs the edge?
- Is IoT installed at key points of the shopfloor and PLC controllers? Is the digital thread established and its associated governance model?
- What closed-loop tasks and information are being relayed back to the data lake and machines? Predictive maintenance? Asset optimization?
2022 is going to be a wild and interesting year for smart manufacturing.
First published on Gartner Blog Network
