Thought leaders in dialogue: Roland Busch, Chief Technology Officer at Siemens - YouTube

IoT adoption in the B2B-world has huge potential.

What we see is that it affects all our markets the way that we are going to connect

the digital and the real world – this is all about IoT. And this is something what allows you to drive

the productivity to the next higher level, to shorten the time to market, which is an

absolutely important KPI for many, or increase the reliability, the uptime for technology – like for trains –

which we want to optimize and really having an IoT-maintenance which allows us to really

deliver 100 percent capacity rather than having a 99 percent or so availability.

And it’s a huge potential and it cuts across all our markets which we are serving.

I give you a reflection on talks to my customers.

So, first and foremost customers are coming and saying: “I have a legacy world,

I have a manufacturing running, how do I connect my devices, how do I get the data?”

So connectivity is number one, followed by: “How to make it cyber secure?

Because we don’t want to get the data to somebody else and very often we are operating

in a real-time environment, in critical infrastructure

so cyber security is of essence. So we have to solve that first.”

And the next step comes which is really figuring out what is the real value which we can drive with IoT?

What are the new business models? How can we improve the overall value chain in a certain application?

So, business models and finding out the right pain points and solving them that is the next charge.

In the transport sector IoT will play an important role, because the transport sector will see

a fourth dimensional disruption it is going to be autonomous, connected, electric and shared.

So, how disruptive can it be?

The biggest point I do believe is that IoT can tear down the silos between different modes.

The real solution for cities for example is an intermodal seamlessly integrated transportation

and train transportation where you use the different modes to the best.

We do not believe that scooters or any kind of Uber alone does the trick – the combination makes it.

And this is exactly where IoT can play its strength: aggregating the data, creating platforms

and really connecting all this different modes for the purpose of having a better,

smother and eventually less CO2 footprint transportation.”

Indeed Siemens is working for more than 30 years on AI. I mean, the algorithms where there

but now the processing power is available. I think what is happening now is:

Number one, we have a huge processing power, we have all the data stored, and AI is really only

getting traction if you have the data available, where you can train your systems.

Number two, we believe the time is right. We can really see now that the traction is going on.

If you ask me, if I’m happy with the adoption rate of new technologies, I would say “No, it can go faster”.

And the reason is in many instances it is about the fear about concerning cyber security

but it is also about the availability of the right capabilities and resources in suppliers

and in our customers that you really have a chance to adopt a new technology.

In order to start this transformation my advice would be:

Start first with identifying your biggest pain points. You can do that often with partners – our IoT unit

for example, they would advise also and make co-creation workshops to find out where these are.

Choose a partner to identify them and then make a plan how you can

dedicate it for this particular pain point, find a solution and implement.

So that means: start narrow, make your first step and grow from there.

Because once you are sitting on an IoT platform you can add more and more applications

and drive it from there. So, it’s not a miracle but you have to start.

This is a big question about how intelligent machines replace people in the work.

I don’t have a fear: Number one is, we are not going to replace people by machines, we are replacing eventually

part of the work which humans can do by machines.

Secondly, we are living in a world where population is aging so we have less and less labor in the market.

In order to compensate while still growing, we need productivity, we need these machines

which can take part of the work. And thirdly, human beings have still something very specific.

And think about it: You don’t have to show your child a hundred thousand pictures of a dog

before it will recognize a dog, so we do something magic.