Industrial Internet Consortium Accelerates IoT Adoption by Empowering End Users

Earlier this year, Gartner released its latest hype cycle for the Internet of Things, positioning IoT on the descent toward the “trough of disillusionment,” with platforms on the left and autonomous vehicles approaching the trough’s bottom.

Richard Soley, executive director of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), quipped to an audience: “For those of you who are following television: ‘Winter is coming.’”

While Gartner’s models help business leaders gauge the risk of emerging tech, IIC follows Alfred Korzybski’s adage: “The map is not the territory.” The consortium emphasizes hands‑on experimentation over theory.

Key to that experimentation is the IIC’s Test Bed program and its partnership with the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona, which delivers end‑user‑centric, vertical‑focused sessions on industrial IoT.

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IIC has also launched an accelerator to support enterprise and industrial IoT end‑users, providing resources and mentorship for rapid deployment.

The consortium uses the World Congress as a platform to demystify broader tech concepts such as artificial intelligence. Last year it rebranded its Industrial Analytics Working Group as the Industrial Artificial Intelligence Task Group, and senior IIC leaders moderated a forum on AI and cognitive systems.

Tracks at the congress include connected transport, manufacturing, healthcare, and a dedicated AI track, illustrating the breadth of IIoT applications.

When asked about the term “artificial intelligence,” Soley noted, “Everybody defines it in a way that’s more convenient to them.”

Five years ago, IIC began developing a core vocabulary, published four years later. “And we’ve stuck to it. All of our documents use the same vocabulary,” Soley said.

Recent AI initiatives include an August test bed that leverages AI infrastructure to automate contract negotiations, and a publication titled “AI Trustworthiness Challenges and Opportunities.”

Another test bed, a joint effort by Dell and Toshiba, monitors a sensorized building outside Tokyo that produces 300 TB of data per day—roughly a couple of petabytes per week.

Soley added, “AI is a suite of technologies that adds value to IoT systems, but it’s not synonymous with IoT. Anything generating large amounts of data will employ AI because it’s the only viable way to process it.”

Gartner’s analysis places most technologies in its IoT hype cycle at 2‑10 years of “reasonable maturity,” as Nick Jones, Gartner’s vice president and distinguished analyst, explained in a recent webinar.

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