The Nokia news release introducing this most recent addition to its MX Industrial Edge product is full with acronyms and technical jargon. Fundamentally, however, this is a means of adapting the sophisticated generative AI that has been the talk of the town for the past year to operational technology (OT) settings.
Making GenAI effective for the particular requirements of the telecom sector is a major topic of discussion in the field. Since off-the-shelf LLMs are not industry-specific, using them in niche settings requires “teaching” them additional specific knowledge. It appears that in this instance, the focus is on contextually relevant real-time information along with the additional security and robustness needed for use cases that are vital to the mission. Additionally, it’s said to help close the never-ending “skills gap.”
According to Stephan Litjens, vice president of enterprise solutions at Nokia, “AI is a key element of industrial transformation.” “MX Workmate combines OT compliant on-premise compute edge for I4.0 applications and worker devices with the combined benefits of our One platform for business-critical wireless connection.
“MX Workmate Generative AI LLM capabilities will change the OT environment, enabling industries to enhance their teams’ skills to improve efficiency, increase productivity and fully integrate IT/OT operations. It is a great opportunity for enterprises eager to advance their digitalization strategy but face challenges due to the gap in workforce expertise.”
According to Reece Hayden, an analyst at ABI Research, “the enterprise market has shown continued interest in generative AI adoption since 2023.” “Manufacturers are no different; a large number of them want to invest in solutions that lower expenses or open up new avenues for revenue. However, installations on the production floor have been hampered thus far due to stringent operational technology (OT) requirements.
The Nokia MX Workmate is the first Gen AI product made specifically for manufacturing floors, and it successfully tackles a lot of these issues. Using natural human language, it enables secure and dependable real-time information transmission in a contextually relevant manner between linked workers and complex OT-systems. According to ABI Research, this will provide workers with noticeable time savings and present deployers with substantial prospects for cost optimisation and safety.
It’s intriguing that augmented reality wasn’t mentioned at this point. AR has been mentioned frequently as a potential use-case in the so-far fruitless hunt for the 5G “killer app.” It seems obvious that a pair of AR goggles displaying the kind of context-specific, GenAI-infused data that MX Workmate claims would be highly beneficial. Perhaps Nokia is not overly promising utopian applications, but rather prudently taking things one step at a time. If so, other marketing divisions ought to be aware of this.
