VMware IoT Lead: AI and IoT to Drive Business Process, IT Value

Artificial intelligence (AI) will act as an enabler and help accelerate IoT projects, according to VMware's IoT lead. To that end, VMware will work to provide both AI-enabled infrastructure technology as well as leverage AI to optimize the technology it develops and delivers to customers, according to Mimi Spier, vice president of IoT business for VMware. "The ability to get data out of things and the amount of impact you can have when you start to use IoT and AI together is quite profound," Spier said. "For the future, to achieve the picture I just painted, you have to have a flexible, manageable, scalable, secure foundation that enables us to do things on the edge … as well as deeper learning in the cloud." Spier lent her impressions on AI and IoT projects during a recent interview around a PWC report that shed a positive light on AI and job creation, with the report's authors concluding AI-enabled technologies will generate as many jobs as they displace overall, when evened out across different sectors. The recent report comes at a time when businesses are still finding that launching IoT projects is hard, and it's taking longer than many in the industry expected, according to Spier.