This week at AspenTech’s premier global event for industrial executives, OPTIMIZE 2021, Bill Scudder, SVP and GM of the AIoT Solutions team at AspenTech explained how the confluence of AI and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) would accelerate the digitalization journey across capital-intensive industries. The session began by explaining how the award-winning Aspen AIoT Hub™ provides the integrated data management, edge and cloud infrastructure, and a production-grade AI environment to build, deploy and host Industrial AI applications at enterprise speed and scale – and power the digital industry of the future.

The presentation delved into how the next generation of enterprises will need to navigate the market volatility, deliver on sustainability and profitability goals, adapt to the tectonic workforce shifts, all while accelerating the digital transformation of their industries to run safer, greener, longer and faster.

 

 

How AIoT Can Be Your Competitive Advantage 

Bill went onto explain how the Aspen AIoT Hub helps the self-optimizing plants of the future leverage industrial data to create a sustainable competitive advantage by:

 

• Analyzing large volumes of industrial data for real-time reporting, automation and decision making
• Integrating data across assets, plants and sites to facilitate an enterprise-wide Industrial AI strategy
• Visualizing data to identify trends, outliers and patterns to drive mission-critical apps and actionable business workflows
• Collaborating on AI-powered apps between domain experts and data scientists by leveraging the Industrial AI Workbench to enable safety, sustainability and profitability goals.

 

An Industrial AI Strategy is Key to Overcoming Barriers to Adoption 

 

 

Also discussed were the results of a targeted survey that AspenTech recently conducted to assess how AI adoption was happening with industrial customers. Through research and by talking to our customers, we learned that:

 

• Increased productivity is by far the biggest benefit of AI for those surveyed
• Lack of confidence, lack of skills, and cost are barriers to adoption

 

To overcome the AI adoption hurdle, there needs to be increased emphasis on democratizing the application of AI to domain-specific industrial challenges with a focus on business outcomes. 

The key to making AI work in real-world applications is getting the learning right — and more importantly, making it valuable and actionable in an industrial business context. Therefore, the development of AI-enabled applications needs to be purposefully guided by domain knowledge to derive real business value and enable measurable ROI.

This is where we get to the paradigm of Industrial AI, which combines data science and AI with software and domain expertise to deliver comprehensive business outcomes for the specific business needs of these capital-intensive industries.

The presentation further discussed how the AIoT Hub provides a cloud-ready and built-for-industry Industrial AI infrastructure designed to unlock the immense value from data assets. It outlined the key benefits and capabilities of a successful AIoT strategy as well as shared an AIoT Hub architecture blueprint of how such a solution would work across the organization.  

 

AIoT is an Evolution… Not a Revolution