Over the last year, countless organizations have continued their digital transformation journey to realize the benefits of Industry 4.0 – from improved worker safety and business resilience to increased productivity and operational efficiency. The Public Transport Authority of Western Australia, for example, is modernizing 250km of railway track to improve safety and deliver greater value to passengers. Clinicas de Las Americas is leveraging virtual reality, telemedicine, digital image processing and remote procedures to elevate healthcare services and improve financial and operational performance. And ESnet is advancing international collaborative scientific research to drive new and spectacular findings from across several galaxies. 

As more and more organizations are adopting innovative technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics and augmented and virtual realities, they are quickly reaping the benefits, from streamlined operations to higher business growth and strengthened market competitiveness. Research has shown that industrial enterprises that have successfully adopted Industry 4.0 technologies are reducing their idea-to-product time by 9.5% and demand to deliver by 10.9%. Enterprises that have mastered machine intelligence achieve triple the improvement to their operational performance. And, similarly, companies with mature AI deployments report superior growth and attribute on average nearly 30% of their total revenue to AI.

The possibilities of digitalization are truly astonishing, the impact on industry and society perhaps immeasurable. Yet, we are only at the beginning of the journey; now, digital transformation is entering a new era.

Fusing worlds and revolutionizing work

Digitalization is accelerating like never before, ushering industry and society into the era of physical-digital fusion and human augmentation. An era characterized by unrivalled efficiency and productivity, rich operational insights and a safer, happier workforce.

The industrial metaverse, enabled by the merging of the physical and digital worlds, will create safer and more sustainable operations, improve automation and prototyping, and enable more agile research and innovation. For public sector agencies such as public safety agencies, the industrial metaverse provides a safe space for situation planning and disaster preparation. Railway operators can create digital twins replicating the entire rail network to improve capacity planning and scheduling, enabling them to test new operating models and their impact before implementing any changes in real life. And power utilities can benefit from grid safety and security simulations to add resilience to their operations.

But the next era of digitalization is not only a revolution of operations, it’s also a revolution of the workforce. With the introduction of new digital tools to the workplace, organizations stand to significantly improve worker safety and productivity by relieving staff of potentially dangerous or repetitive responsibilities. Digitalization also helps address the critical labour and talent shortages by offering technology tools that appeal to and are expected by the next-generation digital native workforce. And it facilities the continuous training of employees to improve onboarding and get the business ready for a digitally-driven work environment.

How do we do all this?  Networks are the key. It takes mission-critical networks with ubiquitous connectivity, intelligent data center technologies and industrial edge cloud computing to provide the capacity, speed, flexibility, resilience and responsiveness required to move, manage and process the sheer volumes of data generated in the Industry 4.0 era. The next era of digitalization is here – and it is fully powered by high-performance networks.

Discover the next digital revolution at MWC 2023

With the next digital revolution underway, I invite you to join us at MWC Barcelona (Hall 3, Booth A20) to get a glimpse of what’s next. Meet our team on-site and catch up online to discover the exponential potential of networks and see how we are driving the digital transformation of industry and society. I look forward to seeing you there!

If you’re not traveling to Barcelona, you can still follow the action online via Twitter or LinkedIn.