Entering a tech congress where they tell you, first thing in the morning, that they’re not going to talk about technology is somewhat puzzling… or disruptive. Richard Soley, Executive Director of the Industrial Internet Consortium, made it clear at the Opening session of the congress: “IoTSWC19 is about real success stories, not technology.” It was just another way to say that we should get over the negativity bias about technology to fearlessly move forward. The IoT ecosystem is much more than a list of acronyms.
Accordingly, Jonathan Neale got very technical during this talk about McClaren’s journey to create advanced sports cars, spanning their F1 race team and exploring new areas such as Healthcare. He did mention IoT, sensors, Digital Twins, Machine Learning, 5G and vehicle to vehicle connection (V2V), but he stressed that the company doesn’t use them “just for tech sake,” but because by doing it the time-to-market of their product “is shorter”. “Connecting everything opens up business opportunities,” said the Chief Operating Officer of the McClaren Group. Neale also enhanced that future challenges in the industry are going to have “to pick up sustainability in a broader sense,” which implies “starting to think about the batteries’ recovery cycle” as of now. The clock is ticking.
Sure, things are moving fast. And a new era of care has arrived in the Healthcare sector. Gloria Zaionz, Tech Guru at the Innovation Learning Network, underlined we’re moving to a predictive type of care, much more proactive, decentralized and people-powered which will make Healthcare more “continuous and seamless”. His colleague, Jules Lancee, Biomedical Engineer at the Radboudumc REshape Center for Innovation, showed how exponential technologies such as AI, Robots, Genomics or Blockchain are being used to develop decision support systems (triage), provide virtual therapy or deliver better care. However, the essential question is and remains: how do we mainstream all these improvements? What is the secret sauce?
In this sense, Zaoinz and Lancee advised the audience to walk in their customer’s shoes before making any decision. They also highlighted that smart IoT has the unique ability to deliver real time insight, capture massive amounts of data that tells the whole story and let you act before action is needed. So, if we take this approach, we will see that there are many fresh opportunities open to us. Yet, we still need policy changes, global standards, interoperability, consumer participation and privacy protection to overcome hurdles and ensure lean success, differentiation, innovation, incremental sales and earnings growth.
Companies are aware of that. Many of them are active and understand how Blockchain and other technologies can help them meet the challenges they’re facing, said Luis Carbajo, CEO of VETTUN, at the Blockchain Solutions World track.
The best proof of this assertion was on the Expo floor, where visitors networked with exhibitors and asked them about their experiences with the IoT ecosystem. They all seemed to know what technologies they were talking about.
Tomorrow, AI is on the menu: What will the world will look like in 10 years?
Stay tuned!