Recently, Ali Research Institute An Xiaopeng said at the Digital Enterprise Study Society “Industrial Internet of Things” seminar that in the next decade, one of the most important themes of the global digital economy is the reconstruction, switching and migration of digital infrastructure, as well as business ecological re-engineering based on new digital infrastructure.

The intelligent technology community represented by the Internet of Things, cloud computing, edge computing, artificial intelligence, mobility, digital twin, etc., in the continuous integration, superposition and iterative upgrading, provides a technical base with high economy, high availability and high reliability for future economic development, and the next 10 years will be the installation period of new digital infrastructure. The development of a new generation of information technology will propel human society into an era of Intelligence of Everything featuring comprehensive perception, reliable transmission, intelligent processing and accurate decision-making.

From a business perspective, with the rise of consumer sovereignty, business systems are becoming more and more complex, which comes from the personalization of customers, from the complexity of products and services, from the diversity and complexity of scenarios, from the complexity of supply chains and so on. Faced with the complexity of the business system, the traditional “digital infrastructure” is becoming more and more inadequate, and the industry is thinking about how to reconstruct the new infrastructure system of the digital economy.

In this great change, the rise of new technologies, new concepts, new practices, and new strategies, such as AIOT, industrial Internet, data center, business center, and microservice, indicates that this great change in business and technology has just begun. On January 11 this year, Ali held ONE business conference, proposed 2B strategy Ali business operating system, and on September 28, the cloud conference further clarified that Ali business operation is to build the infrastructure of the digital economy era. How to look at the trend of future technology and industrial change is a problem that the industry thinks about together.

The industrial Internet of Things we think about today is an important part of the infrastructure system of the digital economy. How do we understand the Industrial Internet of Things and digital transformation? There are four ways to think about it.

Industrial Internet of Things: from stand-alone intelligence to system intelligence

Returning to today’s theme of the Industrial Internet of Things, the first thing we need to think about is how to move from stand-alone intelligence to system intelligence. What is intelligence? Russell famously said, “Intelligence begins with conquering fear.” What are we humans afraid of? Uncertainty. Today we face a variety of market changes, competitive changes, ultimately because we feel uncertain about the future.

So what is intelligence? Intelligence is the ability of an agent to respond to changes in the external environment. This subject can be a machine, a factory, an individual, a research and development team, an enterprise, etc. More importantly, such a subject can make a real-time response to changes in the external environment.

The nature of the Industrial Internet of Things is such an intelligent system that can make real-time, low-cost and efficient responses to customer needs. What is the value of today’s Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, industrial Internet, etc., to an enterprise? This first must return to the essence of the enterprise. The essence of enterprise competition is the competition of resource allocation efficiency.

Today, the value of information technology such as the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, and industrial Internet of Things for enterprises can be simplified and condensed into data plus algorithms, which can improve the accuracy, scientific, low cost and higher efficiency of enterprise decision-making, and promote the optimal allocation of enterprise resources.

We can look at how the information flows in every link of the enterprise’s operation and management, product design, process design, production design, process control and so on after the enterprise’s demand information is clear. In the past, the flow of information was based on the transfer of documents and papers, today we are based on the flow of information, including geometric models, performance models, and process models.

When we think about what is digital and what is intelligent, we not only need to see robots, CNC machine tools, etc., gradually replace manual workers, but we also need to think about whether human intervention is gradually reduced in each process of R & D design, process production, and manufacturing, and whether more managers, process personnel, and R&D personnel can be replaced. This is a more fundamental implication of digital transformation. Delivering the right data, at the right time, in the right way, to the right person and machine, I define this as the automatic flow of data.

Therefore, in the world defined by “data + algorithm”, the essence of digital transformation is to resolve the uncertainty of complex systems with the automatic flow of data, optimize the efficiency of resource allocation, and finally build new competitiveness of enterprises to create higher value for customers.

Today’s world is becoming more and more complex due to the complexity of products, customer needs, supply chains, market changes and so on. For enterprise informatization and digital transformation, how can we resolve the uncertainty of complex systems through the “data + algorithm” decision-making mechanism and the automatic flow of data?

We look at the IoT era, the era of all things intelligent, the logic of product and system evolution, one of the most significant features is the hardware universality, service programmable, control and optimization of technology and functions in the continuous deconstruction and reorganization, reflected in consumer electronics, agricultural machinery equipment, workshop equipment, industrial software.

Consumer electronics: Four years ago at a seminar, one expert said that the biggest feature of Industry 4.0 is customization, and another expert said that Apple, as the world’s largest company by market value, has a production scale that exceeds the scale of Ford’s production more than 100 years ago. What’s the difference between the scale of the car a hundred years ago and the scale of Apple today? We see that the functions of consumer electronics products have been “deconstructed” and “reorganized”, although everyone is using the same Apple phone, but the various functions may not be exactly the same, depending on the various apps we download, depending on the various application services.