The Forrester Smart Manufacturing Predictions report is a fascinating look at the potential directions that some of the latest disruptive technologies may take in the year to come. Digital innovation in the manufacturing sector is measured and thoughtful, but manufacturing often presents real, concrete applications for new tech that bolsters ongoing development. Innovative tech, if proven on the factory floor, can continue to make steady progress into other areas of our world.
Here's a look at how Forrester sees some trends for the coming year.
75% of industrial metaverse projects will rebrand to survive the ‘metaverse winter.’
“Industrial Metaverse” is the first big buzzword Forrester mentions in the report. The average layperson most likely heard the term ‘metaverse’ sometime between 2014, when Facebook acquired VR startup Oculus to develop social and gaming applications for VR technology. In 2021, Facebook rebranded to the name, ‘Meta,’ shifting its focus to developing a metaverse, or a virtual world environment accessed using VR devices, and hosting a variety of social and entertainment experiences. Sometime during the NFT craze of 2021 and early 2022, individuals even considered buying virtual property such as land and other virtual assets in the Meta metaverse.
However, like most other emerging technologies, industrial applications for the metaverse are in development. A Joint report from Siemens and MIT Technology Review described the industrial metaverse as an extension of digital twin technology. A fully realized industrial metaverse would connect the digital twins of a company’s equipment assets, products, supply chain, even public infrastructure and partners’ assets in a virtual world. Although it sounds a bit like The Matrix, the purpose would be to extrapolate the benefits of digital twin into every corner of the product lifecycle. These benefits include predictive maintenance, operational data insights, real-time monitoring and accelerated risk assessment.
Forrester predicted in 2023 that the tech sector would experience a ‘metaverse winter’ or a cooling of market growth as value-add applications lag behind technology. Forrester was more optimistic about the industrial metaverse since it was built on more realistic applications from the start, but the industrial metaverse is experiencing a similar cooling effect.
The report doesn’t blame the digital twin and industrial IoT technologies that power industrial metaverse with this slowing trend. As the report puts it, “The industrial metaverse phrase was an opportunistic rebranding of a group of existing technologies that looks increasingly unwise.”
As a result, the firm’s prediction is simple: vendors will rebrand these technologies to strike the ‘metaverse’ term, moving ahead with those building blocks. Manufacturing leaders in 2024 should focus on realizing benefits of proven technologies like augmented reality, the internet of things and digital twins.
Generative AI will not transform the business of manufacturing in 2024.
ChatGPT may be exciting, but can it write g-code? The answer is yes, GPT3 will return g-code for a CNC machine. However, the better question is: if I’m brave enough to run g-code that I got from ChatGPT and I crash the machine, will my manager fire me?
According to the report, manufacturing leaders are intrigued by the potential applications of generative AI (genAI) such as GPT, but they’re moving cautiously. According to Forrester’s July 2023 Artificial Intelligence Pulse Survey, 29% of AI decision-makers characterize their organization’s use of genAI as “experimentation.” Among manufacturers producing high-tech or industrial products, 47% are still at the experimentation phase.
Two factors explain this caution: Manufacturing workflows require complex interactions between a set of ecosystem partners and a range of expensive machines. Introducing new, largely untested technologies is simply too risky. The impact of mistakes on physical work is prohibitively high with lost productivity, damaged machines, or even injury.
The other factor is security risks related to careless use of public AI tools such as ChatGPT. Because ChatGPT is a learning model, it collects data from the inputs of users. In a high-profile incident early in 2023, three Samsung employees separately shared confidential information with the chatbot. These incidents included an engineer sharing proprietary source code with ChatGPT, another inputted the transcript of a meeting, and the third shared a manufacturing process to get the bot’s advice on process optimization. This information is now accessible to anyone using the service, demonstrating the risk of new technology being used by employees before a company has had time to provide training.
Of course, serious industrial applications of generative AI do not use public ChatGPT. According to Forrester, GenAI has a place, and companies already doing the hard work to structure, clean, and understand their IT and operational technology (OT) data are well placed to take advantage, but even they should proceed with caution in 2024.
30% of Fortune 500 manufacturers will dilute reshoring plans
Reshoring is the next buzzword Forrester tackled in the predictions report. While new American legislation has bolstered efforts, manufacturers such as Apple have noted that the reasons some manufacturing tasks have moved abroad comes down to more than labor costs.
While software and hardware automation is key to making reshoring initiatives viable, Forrester found that automation has taken longer to deliver competitive results on American soil compared to existing offshore solutions. The report highlights four obstacles:
- Identifying processes that made good candidates for automation
- Scaling individual software and hardware solutions
- Achieving interoperability between solutions from different vendors
- Finding and training local talent
These are solvable problems, but according to Forrester’s report, reshoring efforts shouldn’t be about starting fresh. Instead, manufacturers should look to tweak the balance between offshore, nearshore and local capabilities, understanding that this will bring back fewer jobs than some may hope.
Autonomous vehicle investors seek quicker returns in controlled environments
It’s almost 2024, where are our self-driving cars? For consumers who actually want one and are willing to shell out, the wait may be a little longer than Elon Musk originally predicted (before the end of 2016, for anyone counting). While certain municipalities have made legislative and regulatory progress, widespread penetration of cars enabled with the tech on public roads across America may not be in the cards for 2024, said Forrester.
However, the technology that enables self-driving cars has been finding disruptive and value-added applications in vehicles that drive in warehouses, factories and ports. Forrester predicts firms and their investors may shift from the passenger vehicle to the industrial world to see returns and progress faster. The advances made in these environments will be valuable on the roads, but a tangled web of law, demand, public acceptance and red tape still remain in the way.