“AI for IoT”

9

Welcome to IoT Coffee Talk🎙️9 to chat about Digital #Tech #Analytics #Automation #IoT #DigitalTwins #Edge #Cloud #DigitalTransformation #5G #AI #Data #Industry40 & #Sustainability over a cup of coffee.

Grab a cup and settle-in with some of the industry’s leading business minds and technology thought leaders for a lively, irreverent, and informative discussion about IoT in a totally unscripted, organic format.

On this week’s episode, Leonard Lee (neXt Curve) David Vasquez (Verizon), Marc Pous (IoT Giant), Stephanie Atkinson (Compass Inteligence), Rick Bullotta (IoT Guru) and Rob Tiffany (Ericsson) talk about the current state of AI and how AI is making IoT different?

Click below to check out IoT Coffee Talk wherever you get your podcasts:

Thanks for listening to us! Watch episodes at http://iotcoffeetalk.com/. Your hosts include Leonard Lee, Stephanie Atkinson, Marc Pous, David Vasquez, Rob Tiffany, Bill Pugh, Rick Bullotta and special guests.

We support Elevate Our Kids to bridge the digital divide by bringing K-12 computing devices and connectivity to support kids’ education in under-resourced communities. Please donate.

IoT Smoke Detector

For most people, the home smoke detector is the first Internet of Things #IoT sensor/device they’ve ever come in contact with.

It may or may not CONNECT to a remote monitoring service over the Internet.

It COLLECTS air.

It ANALYZES the air looking for smoke using either an ionization chamber or photo-detector.

It ACTS on the insights derived from this analysis and sounds an alarm if smoke is detected. The battery on this device typically lasts a year before the annoying beeping sound begins.

Amazingly, this self-contained IoT device and analytics platform doesn’t require mythical AI powers to deliver value to the customer.

Don’t overthink it.

MIT Connected Things 2020

I was honored to speak at the MIT Connected Things 2020 virtual conference. The event brought together industry leaders from Ericsson IoT, Forrester, MIT, Vizio, and many more to discuss the convergence of #IoT and #AI.

We weren’t at the MIT Media Lab this time around, so we did a virtual WFH Edition. I’ll delivered a keynote on how #DigitalTwins live at the intersection of #IoT and #AI. I hope you enjoy it.

Watch my presentation and others at:

https://www.verypossible.com/resources/video/mitef-connected-things-wfh-edition

Reimagining the Future

Rob and Kevin

#IoT Strategies and #Mobile #Apps for the #COVID19 Pandemic Response

Kevin Benedict and I discuss how the Internet of Things can help companies respond and react to the pandemic and my ideas on the kinds of mobile apps we need to help contact tracing with COVID19.

The Wisdom of Warren Buffet in Tech

You often hear me encourage you to go after the high-value, low-tech, use-cases in #IoT & #IIoT such as remote monitoring coupled with simple threshold/value-matching analytics to cut costs, reduce risks and improve customer satisfaction.

It’s because I’m inspired by the common sense wisdom of Warren Buffet who reminds us that it is “far more profitable to stick with the easy and obvious than it is to resolve the difficult.”

In another great shareholder letter he wrote, “To the extent we have been successful, it is because we concentrated on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over rather than because we acquired any ability to clear seven-footers.”

My takeaway for the Internet of Things is to focus on base-hits, stop boiling the ocean, and stop obsessing about AI stuff that you don’t even understand. Tremendous value is within your reach if you take baby steps and do the easy stuff first.

4IR IRL: The Impending Impact of the 4th Industrial Revolution

At Ericsson’s new D-Fifteen innovation and co-creation center in Silicon Valley, panelists for the #4IR IRL discussion provided an inside look at the strategies and use cases driving innovation. #IoT #IIoT

Moderated by WIRED’s Editor-in-Chief, Nick Thompson, this lively debate across multiple technology disciplines was arguably the best panel I’ve ever served on. There was never a dull moment for the audience as we painted a picture of what the 4th Industrial Revolution will look like.

Watch the video below:

Panelists:

Generating New Revenue with the Internet of Things

Most assets are massively underutilized. This fact is often discovered once assets are made smart & connected to the world of the Internet of Things. #IoT #IIoT

Finding ways to increase the utilization of these often-idle assets is one of the biggest payoffs for an organization embarking on the IoT journey.

Underutilized assets like cars, offices, MRI machines, assembly lines, dishwashers, partially empty trucks on the road, conference rooms, & thousands of others must have their utilization optimized so they can earn their keep.

You wouldn’t let employees spend 75% of their working time taking smoke breaks. Your machines & supply chains should be no different. These underutilized assets & processes must be put to work in a full-time capacity.

This phenomenon is reminiscent of previously-idle servers in data centers that had their utilization boosted via operating system virtualization. They were put to work so they could earn their keep.

Connecting assets to IoT systems & analytics in order to reduce unplanned downtime & increase their remaining useful life are important first steps on your IoT journey to reduce operating expenses.

The next step is to increase the incremental utilization of these assets by connecting them to IoT & Blockchain facilitated digital marketplaces where their spare utilization can be rented to others in order to boost revenues.

As Machine Learning gets better at forecasting the level of asset utilization, a futures market can be created where counter-parties can trade upcoming free utilization.

Share idle assembly lines in factories w/ partners. Share free hours of MRI machine time w/ patients at other hospitals & medical plans. Know where trucks are going & how full they are so we can fill them. Know where unused food & idle commercial kitchens are & feed the hungry.

To sum up: Connect your assets to keep them healthy, know their utilization, & reduce operating costs. Offer up the underutilized portions of your assets to digital marketplaces or other matchmaking engines to earn additional revenue & help others who need what you have.

10 Ways to Achieve Internet of Things Success for your Organization

The #IoT + #IIoT Megatrend is in Danger of Stalling

Many of you who are involved in one of the #IoT segments (industrial, healthcare, consumer, etc.) are currently living in PoC hell. Your pilots, trials and proof of concepts are not making the jump to production for a variety of reasons. I think it’s time to push the reset button on how we convey the value of IoT and how we deliver solutions. The best place to start is by listening to customers.

As it turns out, customers aren’t interested in hearing how smart you are or which esoteric technologies you’re using to build IoT solutions. The only reason they’re talking to you is because they’ve heard Internet of Things solutions can save them money, reduce unplanned downtime/non-productive time, optimize operations, improve worker safety, boost product quality, lower risk and many other compelling value props. Here’s a quick list problems and solutions to get you started:

  1. Customers are finding all the pieces to the IoT puzzle to be too complex. You need to focus on extreme simplicity and reduce friction at every tier of an IoT solution. Hundreds of pages of code examples isn’t working.
  2. Customers don’t have the skill sets needed to work with IoT solutions. Good enough has to be good enough, so stop using technologies and protocols that no one has ever heard of and embrace pervasively adopted tech that everyone already understands. If the tech you’re using isn’t familiar to customers, they’ll be uncomfortable about using your solution.
  3. Customers have heard about large-scale, IoT hack attacks and are reluctant to move forward due to security concerns. Security and privacy must be baked-in to your IoT solution from the get-go and defense in depth must be practiced at every tier of the solution. You must also respect a customers data governance and sovereignty requirements even if it means delivering a 100% air-gapped solution.
  4. Customers struggle to achieve an acceptable return on investment on their IoT solutions. Despite lower costs for all the components required to build an IoT solution, when a customer strings together sensors, microcontrollers, communications networks, storage, middleware, servers, analytics, and integration software, it’s possible that the combined cost could exceed the expected ROI. It’s critically important to beat-up on those costs to stay well-within the ROI envelope.
  5. Customers don’t want another data silo. Too many IoT solutions are focused solely on capturing data from machines and keeping it within their respective systems. It’s important to integrate with a customer’s existing databases, CRM, ERP and other systems no only to add context to machine data but to take actions on insights. Telling a customer they can write code to call APIs on their backend systems is the wrong answer. Make it easy.
  6. Customers keep hearing you must combine Artificial Intelligence with IoT in order to derive value. The tech industry must stop sending this message because it’s dead wrong and it’s scaring customers away. The average person doesn’t know anything about AI except that they think SkyNet is going to take over the planet and robots will be our overlords. There’s tremendous value in connecting your people and machines to gain real-time visibility and situational awareness over your operations. There’s additional value in layering even the simplest analytics to drive decisions and automation. None of this is rocket science and it’s stuff your customers can easily wrap their head around.
  7. Customers who are pitched horizontal IoT platforms quickly become paralyzed. Stop leading with generic, horizontal IoT platforms that try to be all things to all people because it doesn’t work. Customers are not interested in writing code to implement one of many millions of IoT use cases on the platform you’re selling. Your sales motion should include knowing your customer’s business and always leading with vertical solutions to problems they already want to solve.
  8. Customers often find the tech needed to create a smart, connected product eats too much into product profit margins. IoT-enabling products is a super-important way to provide better, ongoing customer service. Especially when those products come with warranties or SLAs that must be met, companies absolutely require IoT capabilities to reduce their risk and eliminate service calls that eat into profits. The sensors, microcontroller, power source, and connectivity for an individual product must always represent the smallest percentage of the total product cost to ensure mainstream adoption. Otherwise, only early adopters will use your smart, connected product.
  9. Customers are unsatisfied with the results they expected from analytics applied to IoT data. This often points to poor data quality and/or unlabeled data. Garbage in, garbage out. Ensure your IoT system is labeling incoming data points as well as mapping unintelligible items like PLC registers to something a human can understand. It’s also super-helpful if your IoT systems knows the data types and units of measure of the incoming data points inside captured data sets to help both simple and advanced analytic systems make sense of the data. Don’t overwhelm customers by delivering 100% of data communicated by endpoints into an IoT system. For the most part, de-duplicate incoming data and only send anomalous data values that stray outside acceptable limits.
  10. Customers have grown tiresome of IoT projects that take too long. I’ve heard of managers who’ve green-lighted IoT projects being asked to leave after 3 years of boiling the ocean to drive value at an organization. Don’t try to boil the ocean anymore. Find small, targeted use cases that can be tackled in just a few months to get tangible, quick wins. When everyone can see the value, move on to the next small project while continuing to build confidence and grow support across the organization. Remember to eat the IoT elephant just one bite at a time.

Keep it simple to achieve success!

Monetizing the Industrial Internet of Things

Mobile Future Forward

I was privileged to moderate a panel discussion on monetizing Industrial #IoT at the Mobile Future Forward conference in Seattle. This year’s event focused on Connected Intelligence and the intersection of Man, Machines and Platforms.

I hosted a panel discussion on Monetizing and Scaling the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Wave with a distinguished panel of guests including:

  • Allen Proithis – President at Sigfox
  • John Aisien – CEO at Bluecedar
  • Russ Green – CTO and Head of Products at SAP Digital Interconnect
  • Adam Hertz – Vice President of Engineering at Comcast

In front of large audience we discussed a variety of important topics including:

  • Why is industrial IoT moving faster than consumer?
  • As the next generation of intelligent endpoints, how are the Mobile and IoT ecosystems blurring?
  • How do the various types of wireless connectivity options fit into IIoT solutions?
  • How do companies get IoT platforms integrated with their existing systems of record?
  • What should organizations be doing to secure their IoT infrastructure?
  • What are different ways companies can monetize IIoT?

We had a lively discussion with great questions from the audience. Chetan Sharma, the number one name in Mobile, knows how to put on a top tier conference and his insights were invaluable.