Industrial manufacturing is behind in 5G, AR/VR, blockchain, and process automation adoption

• At least 75% of manufacturing firms surveyed mentioned adoption of Cybersecurity, IoT, and Smart Analytics in their landscape.
• AR/VR technology has observed the least adoption, followed by 5G, Blockchain, and process automation.
• Connected assets/operations/workforce are the key themes for manufacturing due to the increasing applications of IoT. This has also increased the applications of AI, and smart analytics as manufacturers are trying to draw insights from the huge amount of data generated from the IoT applications.

The Bottom Line: Given the scope of emerging technology applications in the industrial manufacturing landscape, the scope of applications of 5G, AR/VR, and cloud computing looks promising

We are already observing that manufacturing enterprises have started to deploy a private 5G network for their operations. 5G is a game-changer in the smart manufacturing landscape. It will provide a strong foundation of connectivity and more operations control to the manufacturers. Though cloud adoption in industrial manufacturing is less than the industry average, we believe this will increase steadily due to more usage of Cloud PLM, Cloud MES, etc. AR/VR is also used for training, remote support/maintenance, and interactive visualization purposes.