Industrial AI adoption is accelerating, says IFS, but enterprises face a critical execution gap: lacking skills, strategy, and trust, even as AI embeds deeply into operations, driving efficiency and profitability.
AI is being adopted by industrial enterprises at rapid pace, behind-the-scenes and under-the-hood, which is driving an “invisible revolution”, declares a new study by Sweden-based industrial software outfit IFS. At the same time, their jacked-up Industry 4.0 ambitions, reflected in their accelerating AI adoption, are outrunning their means. “Organizations are adopting AI [but] they are not fully prepared for its implementation,” says IFS.
The firm perceives an AI “execution gap” between what enterprises are buying and what they are using. Many don’t have the right staff or skills, and many don’t have the right strategy (or even just a strategy). As industry surveys go (and there are plenty), this feels like a stark one. “As with all revolutions, significant challenges are emerging,” writes IFS. Maybe the starkest finding: that, despite piling in on AI, just 29 percent trust AI to make “strategic decisions”.
In other words: the Industry 4.0 market doesn’t really think AI should be anywhere near critical operations, and yet enterprises are putting industrial AI solutions to work as “embedded, operational AI across core business processes”. The findings of the survey, which polled 1,700 “senior decision makers” at industrial enterprises globally in May, reveal a “rapid but under-recognized shift” away from “consumer productivity AI experimentation”, says IFS.
The sense, then, is that AI is no longer just a knock-about everyday work tool for white-collar workers, but a critical one for blue-collar staff in charge of industrial machines and production lines in the world’s economic engine rooms. “While AI has captured attention for revolutionizing productivity and creative tasks for predominantly white-collar workers, it’s industrial AI that is fundamentally reshaping the way industrial enterprises run,” says IFS.
Source: rcrwireless
