With industrial organizations undergoing rapid, large-scale digital transformations, it can sometimes be easy to miss the forest for the trees. When you get in the weeds on AI and machine learning, big data, analytics, the cloud, and the edge, you can forget that, at the end of the day, the goal of digital transformation is not to accumulate new technologies for the sake of new technologies. It's to use these new solutions to empower employees, make their lives easier and set them up to efficiently deliver new value and innovations for their organization. It's about the people, not just the tech; the latter empowers the former to drive results. The industrial data scientist is a living, breathing example of this -- a relatively new role in the process engineering and industrial sector that has emerged to fulfill a growing need in our industry: marrying traditional data science with localized domain expertise at a time of great, generational change occurring in the industrial workforce.

By combining human-centric machine learning and intelligent context generation, contextere is developing an intelligent personal agent capable of delivering actionable insights at the point of service. Its industrial software weaves together the power of AI and IoT data to give blue collar workers the right information, at the right time, on the right device. Here, Gabe Batstone, contextere CEO shares a vision of the future that empowers workers through automation. In recent years, industrial enterprises have seen a rise in emerging technologies and digital tools that offer considerable improvements in the workplace. It's clear that modernizing in this context is an uphill battle for the blue-collar workforce.

Despite plans to invest in machines and artificial intelligence as part of their strategy to boost productivity, many automotive and industrial equipment companies are failing to implement the measures needed to harness these capabilities, according to a new report from Accenture. The report, "Machine dreams: Making the Most of the Connected Industrial Workforce," is based on interviews with more than 500 business executives in Asia, Europe and the United States involved in setting their company's strategy for the connected industrial workforce. According to the report, manufacturing and production are undergoing rapid change as machines and AI are becoming closely integrated with personnel, creating the connected industrial workforce. By combining mobile, safety and tracking technologies with analytics, companies are enhancing the activities of an industrial worker. The report concludes that the creation of a connected industrial workforce is already part of the business strategy of the majority of automotive and industrial equipment producers, cited by 94 percent of respondents.