AI plus digital twins could be the pairing enterprises need

3. Link AI with transactional workflows

The third point of cooperation is the linkage of AI with transactional workflows. Companies already have applications that take orders, ship goods, move component parts around, and so forth. It’s these applications that currently drive the commercial side of a business, but taking an order or scheduling shipment doesn’t load a truck or label a package. Digital twins have historically been linked to the real world via sensors that detect actual movement, work. How do they capture the commercial applications, the transactions? An open data framework like OpenUSD is a possible answer, and if AI also supports OpenUSD, then there’s a mechanism that not only lets AI “read” workflow data from existing applications, but also generate work to be introduced into those flows.

All of this, in combination, makes AI and digital twins a partner in a business at both the transactional and real-world functional level. The new combination introduces a whole new kind of automation, automation of an entire business. Automation that can touch every process, every worker.

Remember that our current IT spending is justified almost entirely by enhancing the productivity of the 60% of workers who are involved with the commercial/transactional side of things? That’s left 40% of the workforce out of the productivity picture, and their value of labor is actually a bit higher than that of the 60% of workers we’ve already reached. What kind of IT spending could reaching these workers justify? Digital twins, combined with AI, could totally remake IT, and totally remake networking.

Why networking? The 40% of “functional” workers, the ones out there pushing boxes, driving, even fighting fires or protecting the population, will need their own data collections to be empowered successfully. We’ll need to know what’s going on in the real world at a level we don’t even approach today. If you believe that autonomous vehicles can navigate the streets, then you believe that we can build a digital twin of those streets and an AI controller to get the vehicle safely (and legally) to the destination. If you believe that, then you believe we can understand and optimize the movement of goods and the providing of services in the same way.

What we’ve learned with AI and with the IoT/digital-twin initiatives so far is that low apples don’t provide the best ROI, and trying to find opportunities for new technologies individually is less likely to be successful than planning to use them cooperatively in order to address the complexity that’s a regular part of our work, our lives. And the good news is that, behind the hype, companies are starting to offer the tools needed to harness all the good stuff that we’ve talked about, and businesses are starting to see how to adopt those tools. So don’t be distracted by all this AI hype, or by vague claims of autonomous operation. Reality may be closer, and better, than you think.