# Interview
# Interview

Smart Money – IOT and AI

1/06/2018

Speaker

Steinbeis

You were back at the Hannover Messe for a few days at the beginning of April, which impressions you have taken in the area of IoT.

Christian

At the Hanover Fair IoT is mainly concerned with industrial production. It is impressive to see how far German and European companies are in this area. In addition, we see many applications in the medical and automotive sector in the IoT environment.

Steinbeis

How do you assess the potential of IoT over the next few years?

Christian

According to Gartner, there are about 25 billion IoT devices by 2020, and there are currently about 5 billion devices. This illustrates the potential of IoT applications across industries. That's why we recently invested with other private investors in NBT AG, an IoT company builder in Berlin. It is the combination of IoT and Artificial Intelligence that will be relevant in the industry today, and especially in the future.

Steinbeis

What does that mean in concrete terms?

Christian

The keyword is: intelligent factory. In recent years, companies have networked their production lines and factories, and now it's all about extracting new insights from the data - e.g. through machine learning.

Steinbeis

Machine learning, as an AI domain, describes the ability of software to adapt and improve itself based on its previous interactions with the environment. What meaning does this have in the field of production?

Christian

This means that how a person learns through experience and adapts his behavior, a program code does the same thing. When companies use intelligent software in their production facilities, they are able to analyze the behavioral patterns of machines in large volumes of data. In this way, failures of individual components can be predicted, faults and causes can be identified in advance. Companies can then also schedule service work with advance.

Steinbeis

Which companies do you see as pioneers in this area?

Christian

There are a number of companies that, in our view, set accents as suppliers in this area, such as: Beckhoff Automation, B & R Industrial Electronics, Balluff, SICK and PHOENIX CONTACT. In this context, Siemens has created a good basis for the combination with artificial intelligence in production plants with its open IoT operating system. By analyzing the operating data and measurements from sensors, the software can detect whether anomalies occur in the production plant or the installed automation solution that lead to production disruptions or failures.