How Real-Time Data and AI Will Power the Industrial Future

Tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google can collect real-time data from billions of users. For companies that design and manufacture physical products, that type of fluid, data-rich information used to be a pipe dream. Now, with the rise of cheap and powerful sensors, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence, things are changing—fast.

In this session, digital strategy expert Venkat Venkataraman offers a first-of-its-kind playbook that will help industrial companies combine what they do best—create physical products—with what digitals do best—use algorithms and AI to parse expansive, interconnected datasets — to make strategic connections that would otherwise be impossible.

The laws of competitive advantage are changing, rewarding those who have the most robust, data-driven insights rather than the most valuable assets. To compete in the new digital age, companies need to use real-time data to turbocharge their products, strategies, and customer relationships. Those that don’t risk falling on the wrong side of the next great digital divide.

Venkat Venkatraman is the David J. McGrath Jr. Professor in Information Systems at the Questrom School of Business, Boston University. He is considered one of the foremost authorities on how companies develop strategies to win with digital technologies.