Eighty percent of businesses are investing in some form of AI today. With such an overwhelming number of firms seeing the potential in AI solutions in addition to Industrial IoT technology, one would imagine that a large percentage of CIOs and managers would have a solid grasp of what it takes to both measure and communicate the ROI of their initiatives to their boards.
But as recent research has demonstrated, that’s not the case for the majority of business leaders. Many of them are still unclear on the tools, time commitments, and expertise required to successfully implement AI initiatives and reap the benefits of their investments.
At Plutoshift, we’re tackling this deficit through AI solutions that are straightforward and hyper-focused on specific, practical, and data-intensive tasks. This framework helps operators have access to actionable insights about their processes from the data they already collect.
Over the past few months, I have been sharing this vision behind Plutoshift and my outlook on AI with a number of customers and partners across manufacturing industries. Below is a synopsis of that vision that may serve to ease some of the anxieties around AI initiatives; a CEO’s playbook of sorts.
Data → Insight → Alerting → Action
For AI to have a material impact on business, solutions must begin with data and lead to actionable response to a problem or opportunity. My background in this area is in leveraging Deep Learning frameworks to understand the data that’s generated in the physical world, but I recognize that the AI models must serve up the action and not just the intel for the user to interpret.
The measurements collected by a data collection system are only as valuable as the recommendations it can display in the platform for users to see.
Drive specific outcomes with AI
Water is my passion, and AI is the engine we have designed at Plutoshift to ensure that AI actually works in the real world. There are many companies in this space that are pursuing an everything-and-anything model for AI. We don’t search for pie in the sky problems to solve, we go for practicality and that starts with real use cases tied to concrete ROI.
In the case of Plutoshift, AI manifests itself in the form of Process Performance Monitoring. This is a specific application of AI that involves providing access to performance metrics related to resource consumption for various processes. It’s a unified view that shows the current reality as well as future outcomes to the operators. To make it even more practical, the platform is currently oriented towards manufacturers with a critical reliance on water in their processes.
Built for scale
In my view of the world, data intelligence solutions must be scalable on several fronts:
- Aggregation of data across multiple sources to have a single unified source of truth
- Ability to drive ROI for business units
- Consistent management of information across the team
While we believe that the ROI for an initial pilot must be attractive, the real payoff is recognized when the proven solution is executed across the organization and supported by the wrap-around customer experience that we have developed.
Don’t Try To Boil The Ocean
AI solutions have the potential to save a lot of time and money in the manufacturing industry, but only if businesses are able to execute in an efficient way that doesn’t drag down the entire organization.
In my experience, AI has the ability to make a very positive impact if it’s deployed in a practical way. If you’re interested in learning more about driving business outcomes with AI, take a moment to schedule a demo of our solution here.
