The webinar we ran on Industrial IoT in manufacturing

On Wednesday 1 November 2023 we ran a free one-hour webinar on the transformative power of Industrial IoT and artificial intelligence in the manufacturing sector. Dave Fox and Tom Ulanowski — both co-founders — presented it together, which is how we do most things.

Why we ran it

We kept having the same conversation on factory floors. A plant manager would ask what “Industrial IoT” actually meant for a building that was already full of working equipment, and whether the answer involved replacing any of it. The honest answer is short enough to fit in an hour, and it is much easier to give once than fifty times.

What we covered

• What Industrial IoT means on a working floor. Permanent instruments on equipment that had none, reporting continuously, instead of a person with a clipboard reporting occasionally.
• What you can measure without touching the process. Water, electricity, natural gas, compressed air, temperature, humidity, vibration and level — most of it non-invasive, most of it wireless, none of it requiring the line to stop for long.
• Where AI genuinely helps, and where it does not. A model is only as useful as the data underneath it. A factory running on monthly utility bills has nothing to feed one. That is the part people found most useful, and it is still true.
• What changes in the first year. Not the technology — the meetings. Once a team can see the overnight floor on its own equipment, the argument stops being about whether there is waste and starts being about which fix goes first.

What we would say differently now

Two years on, the hardware is cheaper and the batteries last longer, but the sequence has not changed at all: measure first, then decide. Every project we have run since has confirmed the same order.

The social tile and the original announcement for this session are in our archive. If you would like the same walkthrough for your own team, we are happy to run it on your floor instead of over a screen — that version is better anyway, because we can point at your equipment.