The industrial Internet of Things is going to create more jobs and act as a driver of economic productivity, according to Bruno Berthon and his colleagues at Accenture. In an article for TechCrunch, Berthon suggests that his company’s recent survey of business leaders indicates a great deal of optimism not just about increased capabilities for their enterprises, but greater opportunities for their employees.
Berthon identifies the main advantage of the Internet of Things as mass data, speculating that it will allow business managers to engage in advanced and often predictive data analysis; for example, an agricultural company could use various relevant data sets to identify certain areas for guaranteed yields of a given crop, or aerospace engineers could use IoT data to institute pre-emptive maintenance and corrections to their products.
Meanwhile, with mass data allowing managers to more effectively manage the more large-scale issues faced by their companies, employees will be free to handle more specific, outlier issues, or to focus on innovation. Berthon cites the example of a steel company in Maryland at which the automation allowed by IoT analytics let the company focus more on knowledge-intensive work, which also called for higher pay.
That having been said, 72 percent of the business managers surveyed said they haven’t yet made solid business plans with respect to the industrial IoT. Berthon suggests that leaders need to embrace risk and start adapting to the emerging changes that the IoT is bringing; as a wise man once said, ‘you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone’. And indeed some companies are: electronics giants like Samsung have been keen to get a conversation going about the challenges and opportunities presented by the IoT, and the mobile world is certainly paying attention as well.
Accenture predicts that by 2030 the IoT could increase 20 of the largest countries’ gross GSP by $14 trillion USD, and 86 percent of the business leaders surveyed said the IoT will create more jobs. The opportunities are there; it’s time to seize them.
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