Industrial organizations face similar challenges that require rapid innovation: there are shortages of skilled workers, strained supply chains, and mounting geopolitical conflict.
In addition to these, our society faces the existential threat of climate change. With around 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions coming from industry, leaders have a responsibility to tackle this pressing problem.
By harnessing the power of data, industrial companies are becoming more resource-efficient and productive, and therefore more sustainable. However, while we have seen evidence of success, many industrial organizations find managing the pace, scale, and complexity of the transformative change required to meet net-zero targets and mitigate environmental impacts extremely challenging. Here we will explore why it is necessary to run this dual transformation of digitalization and sustainability concurrently.
AI can make all the difference. It lets you go faster while ensuring you stay on the track. It helps turn a race to transform into a finely tuned victory lap.
Time is running out, and we need both urgency and precision. “We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar,” is how Bill Gates explains the situation in his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
Think of it like the classic slot car game; digitalization is the accelerator, pushing the car – your business – faster on the track ahead. In the real world, this enables quicker production, market agility, and sustainable transformation.
But at some point, you will hit a speed limit or fly off the ‘track’ at a curve. In business, progress stalls, strategy gets diluted, and efficiency drops.
Here’s where artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play: it acts like the elevated curves of the track keeping the vehicle grounded despite its speed. Every variable impacting that car – velocity, friction, timing – is under control. All data within the organization is harnessed to push the limits; mastering sharp turns in markets, resource management, and strategic vision without losing momentum.
AI can make all the difference. It lets you go faster while ensuring you stay on the track. It helps turn a race to transform into a finely tuned victory lap.
“Undoubtedly, there is a level of hype but the technology behind this is real and will have a transformative impact.”
As consumers, AI-based tools have become a feature in our daily lives, whether that’s helping us to write better copy or translating languages in real-time. However, while there is great talk about AI’s gigantic potential, it has yet to materialize in supporting tangible societal progress and large-scale development, significant GDP growth, or broad economic gains outside of a small group of tech players.
But is AI overhyped? And does this mean we should deprioritize it and turn to other technological developments? I believe it is, but that doesn’t mean that it is not valuable; again, precision matters. Undoubtedly, there is a level of hype but the technology behind this is real and will have a transformative impact.
To start with, AI is not new, particularly in the industrial context: industry has been steadily developing AI since the 1970s, making it reliable, secure, trustworthy, and suitable for industrial use. ‘Industrial AI’ now meets the requirements of the most demanding environments, enabling us to communicate with software, equipment, or machines in natural language, and helping us to design processes or even entire plants.
Crucially, industrial AI is making a difference in the one area where we cannot afford any hype: sustainability. It enables us to leverage all the data that sits in digital twins, for example, to do things faster in the virtual world first, improving efficiency and reducing waste so that we can do more with less in the real world.
Industrial AI enables us to harness the one vital thing we have in abundance across industries: huge amounts of data. We’ve all heard it: data is the new oil – but with far greater potential for sustainable good. AI gives us the means to transform that data into meaningful information, turning numbers into actionable insights.
In the future, we will be able to develop new industrial AI solutions much faster thanks to the power of data. The next powerful models will be trained around industrial environments, with industrial data – Industrial Language Models. Today, the modalities –the types of input and output data an AI system can interpret – are pictures, texts, video, or code. Soon, these will also be 3D/CAD data, 2D/complex diagrams, time series, and industrial business data.
The real value and potential benefit of AI lies in the industrial world – the backbone of our economies. Our opportunity is to extract the most useful parts of industrial AI and combine them with data and other technologies like digital twins or software-defined automation. It will be a supercharger for digital and sustainability transformation – and we have only scratched the surface.
Reaping the full benefits of industrial AI will largely depend on whether we, as industrial companies, can master the complexities, fully adopt, and scale this technology, and jointly drive it forward. We also need to invest heavily in the enablers of AI – chips, computing, and people. Without the chips, we have no computers – and without the AI experts creating the smart algorithms, AI will not reach its full potential. Now is the time for boldness; to scale the development and application of industrial AI – both bottom-up and top-down – at speed.
To win the race against climate change, we are going to need every bit of creativity we can get, and not just human creativity.
We always need to come back to the ‘Why of AI.’ We must not use AI – or indeed any other technology – just for the sake of it. Technology can only ever be our ‘How’ in making an impact and transforming the everyday.
To win the race against climate change, we are going to need every bit of creativity we can get, and not just human creativity. AI will enable us to do more with less in our industrial world. It’s our duty to make sure we use it for good.
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