It is always a point of interest to be present at the birth of a new buzzword. In this instance, it is hoped this neologism will help usher in an umbrella of concepts and technologies to operationalise the industrial and enterprise IoT.
GenAIoT, relating to the intersection of generative AI and the Artificial Internet of Things (AIoT), has been introduced by The IoT Community, a 49,000-strong C-suite network. SAS, ClearBlade, SoftServe and Intellias are among the founding members of the community.
The organisation outlines its rationale for launching the term. “The IoT Community believes that the integration of GenAI and AIoT can facilitate the collection of vast amounts of data through IoT devices,” the IoT Community noted. “This data is then analysed and interpreted using Gen AI and AIoT, providing valuable insights that can be quickly communicated to other machines or users, enabling faster and more efficient problem solving.
“This innovative approach has the potential to revolutionise the problem solving process by providing insights in a timelier manner than ever before.”
This point of view was backed up following a visit to the MWC 2024 event in Barcelona to ‘identify opportunities in this new domain’. The IoT Community came up with an overall market opportunity of $4.5 trillion (£3.56tn). This is through combining GenAI ($1.3tn-$1.5tn), IoT ($1.4tn for traditional IoT and $600bn for AIoT), and applying GenAIoT vertically across manufacturing, supply chain, customer service and other industries ($1.2tn).
While those figures will need to stand up to scrutiny, The IoT Community is not the only group to come to this conclusion. A January paper from researchers at The Ohio State University and the University of Southern California also explored the link between AI-generated data and IoT-related application domains, ranging from mobile networks, to autonomous vehicles, to robotics.
Even though realising the full potential of generative AI in IoT is ‘not trivial’, the researchers noted interesting inflection points and initiatives currently taking place. One such in the realm of autonomous vehicles is WEDGE, a multi-weather autonomous driving dataset built from generative vision language models.
This chimes in with the view of GenAIoT and its founding members. “To work, Gen AI needs data and many times that is IoT-centric data,” said Guy Merritt, VP of solutions and consulting at SoftServe. “This is a natural evolution between AI and IoT to enable the next revolution that is impacting a multitude of industrial sectors.”
You can find out more about the initiative by visiting genaiot.net.
(Photo by Nejc Soklič on Unsplash)
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