When we talk about “Industrial” a few things that come to mind are companies engaged in manufacturing and factories where goods are made by machines.

So it’s not surprising the term ‘Industrial Internet’ is being slightly overlooked by people outside of the industries using them.

Although industrial internet might sound like a plot out of a Sci-Fi blockbuster (think “The Matrix” or “The Terminator”), the use of machines talking to machines, machines predicting problems, and self-troubleshooting is happening around us all the time.

As the Industrial Internet is incorporated into more technologies, products and services are becoming more efficient and responsive, delivering more benefits for the consumer.

In health care, doctors are shifting focus from the treatment of disease state to prevention of a disease state. Brad Hahn, a senior vice president at Aurora Healthcare, thinks that with the help of the Industrial Internet, and its data collection capabilities, the health care system which has 15 hospitals, 185 clinics, and more than 80 community pharmacies, can do just that.

By partnering with General Electric (GE), Aurora is on a faster pathway to the discovery of symptoms of breast cancer and cardiac arrest.

“Things don’t happen in a moment,” said Jeff Immelt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of GE at a recent Minds and Machines Summit. “It’s about transitions and change,” he added.

How GE is leading the way

Imagine millions of devices, vehicles, buildings, and smart machines with enabling technologies such as sensors and robotics, intelligent machines running software analytics, all managed by the people who develop the software and run the machines.

The prediction is that 50 billion items will be connected by 2020.

Helping GE’s people in their transformation are telecom companies such as AT&T and Verizon, system integrators like Accenture, a multinational management consulting services company, and CISCO for Edge Computing.

Edge computing is pushing computing applications, data, and services away from centralized nodes and enables analytics and knowledge generation to occur at the source of the data.
This is where you come in.

As GE is transforming itself to become the world’s premier digital industrial company, take a moment to explore opportunities with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive and predictive.

GE is organized around the “GE Store,” through which each business shares and accesses the same technology, markets, structure and intellect. Each invention further fuels innovation and application across our industrial sectors. With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of the Industrial Internet.