Watson IoT chief: AI can broaden IoT services
IBM thrives on the complicated, asset-intensive part of the enterprise IoT market, according to Kareem Yusuf, GM of the company’s Watson IoT business unit. From helping seaports manage shipping traffic to keeping technical knowledge flowing within an organization, Yusuf said that the idea is to teach artificial intelligence to provide insights from the reams of data generated by such complex systems.
Predictive maintenance is probably the headliner in terms of use cases around asset-intensive IoT, and Yusuf said that it’s a much more complicated task than many people might think. It isn’t simply a matter of monitoring, say, pressure levels in a pipe somewhere and throwing an alert when they move outside of norms. It’s about aggregate information on failure rates and asset planning, that a company can have replacements and contingency plans ready for potential failures.