Convergence of AI and IoT: Sustainable business continuity

With the industry saw there is significant investments in the convergence of AI and IoT, and creating new markets and opportunities. Internet of Things (IoT) is all about having devices connected to the internet, so they’re able to the real time situations based on the data they collect.

As the IoT’s business potential continues to be realised through new and innovative use cases, a report says, 80% of enterprise IoT projects will include an AI component, up from only 10% today. IoT is important to remember that building AI algorithms that have intelligence is often just a piece of the overall solution.

Big Data, AI, and IoT are three of the most widely misappropriated terms of recent times, and many do not know how these technologies are linked, or how they have paved the way for the technological progress we have come to expect. Companies worldwide are now highly focussed on updating their business processes and adopting digital platforms that will help them serve customer needs more effectively and reliably. However, aging legacy systems are crippling IT’s ability to innovate and bring new value to the business, and they’re limiting cultural change within organizations.

“For so many years, people have been saying ‘we’re collecting so much data, and we don’t know what to do with it’ but I believe AI is partly an answer to this problem,” he said. “With AI, large amounts of information can be collected, and essential patterns and insights from it can be found and automated; simplify the very process of making use of data.”

He’s not alone; it appears the market is responding to this very realisation as well; Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 80% of enterprise IoT projects will include an AI component, up from only 10% today.

According to Gartner, while the technology landscape for AI is complex and will remain so through 2023, with many IT vendors investing heavily in AI, it is hopeful enterprises will be able to achieve good results with AI from a wide range of IoT information, from video, still images, speech and network traffic activity to sensor data.

AI and ML makes it possible to identify patterns in constant streams of data. Data could be collected from the sound equipment is making, the temperature that the equipment is generating, the vibrations or the smell etc. and it could be indicative of a change from normal to abnormal.

In manufacturing, Deloitte found that predictive maintenance can reduce the time required to plan maintenance by 20–50%, increase equipment uptime and availability by 10–20%, and reduce overall maintenance costs by 5–10%. Through AI, enterprises are also able to monitor more data points; this is paying dividends in areas like fleet management. Cloudera, for example, claims its fleet management AI solutions can cut downtime for fleet vehicles monitored by Navistar devices up to 40%.

For an example like smart speakers including Alexa and Siri. Neither of these products would exist without the combination of both IoT and AI.

AI is the speech recognition, and the IoT is the fact that it’s a connected device that could help can collect and respond to what you’re saying. However, Internet of Things is getting smarter. Successful digital transformation requires a cultural shift which impacts all processes, systems, actions, and people across an organization, yet it often gets lost in the technology shuffle and now companies are incorporating artificial intelligence—in particular, machine learning—into their IoT applications.

Artificial intelligence plays a growing role in IoT applications and deployments. Both investments and acquisitions in startups that merge AI and IoT have climbed over the past two years. Major vendors of IoT platform software now offer integrated AI capabilities such as machine learning-based analytics.

Lastly, AI, an enterprise can use IoT devices to collect data from the products they are selling and generate insights about their usage and whereas, artificial intelligence is making a splash in the Internet of Things (IoT). Companies crafting an IoT strategy, evaluating a potential new IoT project, or seeking to get more value from an existing IoT deployment may want to explore a role for AI.