The industrial future lies ahead with rapid transformation through high-end technologies like AI, IoT, and blockchain.

But what makes these technologies so distinct is their outstanding ability to automate the entire infrastructure. It becomes easier and smarter for you to supervise the industrial processes in detail. Also, with the rapid increase in globalization, product complexities, and raised customer demands, the firms are switching over advanced technologies to improve supply chain operations.

Not only the supply chain, but manufacturing, hospitality services, equipment maintenance, and the entire plant is automatically operated through sensor-enabled and smart technologies. These skills help revolutionize the industries with data-driven techniques and allow you to utilize this data for analytics.

Internet of Things (IoT) technology is bringing new and cheaper ways to establish communication among the “things.” Blockchain offers transparency, immutability, security, and interoperability to create technological ecosystems, which were not possible before. Statista forecasts that about 70 billion IoT devices will be connected by the end of 2025.

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Also, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology delivers greater value to industries by significantly replacing human elements with autonomous machines, robots, vision, and others. Moreover, the advancement in 5G communication is a positive catalyst to our surroundings. Let’s learn how these three technologies contribute to making the industries better.

Benefits of merging the three technologies: Boosting industrial efficiency

Data is the absolute lifeblood of any business. Today, big data has wide applications in multiple industries like retail, healthcare, financial services, agriculture, oil and gas, and many more. Organizations that assimilate data to resolve customer queries gain larger profits along with consumer retention. The demand for big data is transcending multiple sectors and significantly driving the economy for tomorrow.

Internet of Things technology requires the cloud to operate efficiently and keep the data secured. Also, AI has remained only as a model till the advent of big data. More-so, data is the primary component involved in the strategies for developing AI and machine learning concepts. These technologies are now being used in a wide variety of applications from chatbots to self-driving vehicles. Factually, there is barely any possibility of any business that has not yet been a target of AI. The concept introduces innovation and rapid transformation in the industries for improved performance and asset functioning.

Multiple industries leveraging the benefits that count

The use of the technological combination allows the industries to gain multiple benefits and perform up to the mark. These benefits include:

• Automating the industrial process
• Saving time and reducing surplus costs
• Building a decentralized environment
• Gaining deeper insights
• Enhancing data security
• Access to large volumes of data
• Optimized energy consumption
• Improving smart contracts

Taking the example of Porsche, it is officially the first automaker to test blockchain concepts in vehicles. It has collaborated with the German business XAIN to implement the technologies to automate its cars. The whole idea is to ensure the security of the drivers with data-driven techniques. Using their smartphones, the drivers will have access to the traffic data on a blockchain, which is consistently received from the connected vehicles in the surroundings. It thus promotes predictive maintenance and autonomous driving through useful data for a better and smooth driving experience.

Talking about the stock business, many start-ups are introducing AI concepts to predict the stock market. This is mainly because of the highly suspicious nature of the stocks; the traders and brokers require innovative tools and concepts to manage the market regarding predictions, forecasting, and transaction verifications. Thus, high-end technologies like AI are in huge demand for effective results in the stock market.

Artificial Intelligence has a long way to run in parallel to the technological expansion in industries, and blockchain seems to be its natural companion in this run. Statistically, AI is about to generate about USD 100 billion ROI in the industries. Also, as forecasted by McKinsey, AI will generate between 3.5 and 5.8 trillion USD annually by the end of 2025 across 19 industries. Most of the industries are working towards the implementation of smart city projects by combining IoT, AI, and blockchain concepts. The trio offers significant benefits like reduced energy consumption, well-structured monitoring of the consumption patterns, unnecessary wastage of energy resources.

Moreover, several other concepts are used for driving industrial performance better and smarter with the help of high-end technologies. These have undoubtedly made self-driving cars, intelligent homes, robotics, and cognitive systems real, which is positively impacting our lives in the current times.

Spawning new concepts to drive better industrial performance

The combination of AI, IoT, and blockchain is transforming the ways we live and work. For instance, as an individual, you can trade green energy to another consumer or give the energy back to the smart grid. This suffices the usage of energy as a resource in a significantly reduced amount and provides adequate distribution across all the connected networks. Thus, we can say that while IoT technology enables accurate data measurement, blockchain provides transparency and audit, and AI renders the required intelligence to make the overall functioning smarter.

Additionally, the trio can be used to revolutionize how digital identity and credentials are provided to fulfill industrial requirements. IoT identifies the data, blockchain controls the accesses of that data, and AI prevents the frauds. It reflects how essential the three technologies are in bringing transparency to the social networks and improving corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices to a greater extent. Also, blockchain helps AI to scale up the data, manage resource sharing, and create a trustworthy and transparent data economy for successful industrial progress.

The convergence of AI, IoT, and blockchain promotes the use of data analytics, which allows the industrialists to render new and innovative services to their customers. It helps in harvesting better business intelligence and enables target-based functionalities. Finally, the time is here that we can realize the potential of data-driven concepts through the use of smart technologies. The essential thing that matters the most here is the transformative power of the technological weave for enhancing the business competitiveness in marketing, sales, customer service, and many other domains.

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From time to time, we invite industry thought leaders, academic experts and partners, to share their opinions and insights on current trends in blockchain to the Blockchain Pulse blog. While the opinions in these blog posts are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of IBM, this blog strives to welcome all points of view to the conversation.