Industrial Internet
Tajta Ákos, GE Lighting

At GE, we believe tomorrow’s economy will be revolutionized by the Industrial Internet, which will connect intelligent machines with brilliant people, allowing them to find new ways to address major global challenges. The Industrial Internet is interconnected. Machines ‘speak’ to one another. The margin for human error and the time required to get things moving can be drastically reduced. For example, an industrial machine or component can ‘communicate’ how effectively it is operating to other machines and technicians. It can communicate instantly faults or operational inefficiencies so that these can be corrected rather than going unnoticed until regular maintenance. This can save thousands of dollars in operating costs, improve energy efficiency and extend machine life. If we consider the area of healthcare, improvements in the responsiveness and efficiency of communication between Lifesaving machines and operations is even more compelling.

To get a sense of the power of the Industrial Internet, consider what GE calls the power of 1%. The Industrial Internet will touch on countless sectors and sub-sectors of the economy and the devices that power those sectors, from industrial machinery to smart phones, sensors and controls. If we extrapolate merely 1% efficiency or productivity improvements from a huge installed base of technologies with countless, perhaps exponential, sets of touch points or nodes within the modern economy —every machine, every smart phone, every movement sensor, every control device, etc etc –we start to get a sense of the power of 1%.