How IoT could power the future and what could stop it

Certain IoT roadblocks will prevent companies from building intelligent processes. What will it take to clear them away?

In this Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) can help companies increase productivity and growth. But two barriers – incomplete data and wrongly calibrated sensors –  stand in the way of achieving benefits at scale. As these barriers fall away, products and services will become far more personalized. Success in this new arena will require companies and governments to build strong trust-based relationships with those they serve.

Here, Now and Beyond - Intelligence realized through IoT

The IoT is the heartbeat of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – a revolution of game-changing innovation made possible by the combination of big data, analytics and physical technology. The volume of data that new web-connected systems will have available, combined with their ability to self-enhance through increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI), could fundamentally change how society operates.

Businesses have two primary goals from this IoT and AI-powered revolution: productivity and growth. Despite efforts to improve efficiency and offset cost through labor arbitrage, businesses need new approaches to offset years of productivity decline. The use of emerging technologies to measure such things as asset utilization, combined with AI and real-time decision management systems give many businesses great hope of increasing productivity.

IoT, AI, data management and cloud solutions also give businesses great hope of accelerating growth. Companies can build platforms to listen to customers, recognize their behaviors and preferences, and better address their needs – even to the point of predicting what they want – and that leads to growth.

Indeed, the Fourth Industrial Revolution gives companies the chance to move from dreaming about growth and productivity improvements to making significant strides on both fronts. But two barriers stand in the way of achieving the benefits of IoT and AI at scale – barriers that we can help tech vendors remove, before they become insurmountable roadblocks.

Falsified data due to wrongly calibrated sensors

When people watch the oven while cookies bake, and they see or smell something that seems wrong, they intervene. But in an automated world, rather than a person overseeing the process it’s a robot. The robot uses IoT sensors combined with AI to monitor and determine when an intervention is needed and to take the necessary action.

The sensors informing the robot have to be calibrated to send accurate signals, otherwise the robot will misread the situation. It will have a false view of reality and no experience to recognize that. In the baking example, if a sensor is indicating the temperature is correct when in fact it’s too hot, the robot will not intervene and the cookies will burn.

This same analogy applies to the use of IoT and robots at scale. If an IoT sensor is wrongly calibrated, small errors going into the process can produce disastrous outcomes. That is why, as use of IoT and AI grows, calibration of IoT devices will become both critical and challenging.

In a single manufacturing shop floor where there may be at most a few hundred sensors, calibration can be done by humans. But when there are millions or billions of devices in a smart city, for example, humans cannot feasibly do the calibration. Recognizing this significant barrier to scale, we are developing a Calibration-as-a-Service platform that uses AI on IoT sensor networks to calibrate, warn and correct sensors in real time. That way companies can be sure the data they use for processing is accurate and reliable.