The Future of Industrial Innovation: Leveraging AI, Digital Twins, and IIoT to Transform Industries

In April 2025, the Open Institute of Technology (OPIT) invited Professor Andrea Gozzi, Head of Strategy at Partnership for the Digital Industries Ecosystem at Siemens, Italy, to talk about how new technologies are transforming industry.

Industry Is Driving Technological Innovation

According to Gozzi, who teaches in the OPIT BSc in Digital Business and MSc in Digital Business and Innovation programs, many of the young people he meets imagine that the development of technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) is being led by digital companies like Amazon and Apple. But, he adds, they haven’t really considered how industry is utilizing and leading in these fields.

Industry includes markets such as energy, aviation, and manufacturing. Gozzi explains how new technologies are transforming these industries and, in turn, how these industries are pioneering new technologies. As a result, industry represents a growing job market, especially for OPIT graduates.

Challenges to Industry

Gozzi started his discussion by explaining the modern challenges facing the industry today and how these challenges necessitate innovation. He identified three principal challenges:

• Geopolitical instability events like the war in Ukraine and changing tariffs are undermining supply lines, complicating contracts, and making sales unpredictable.
• Labor shortages are being caused by changing demographics and changing culture. Gozzi explained that in the past, people worked for one company for their entire lives, learning specialist skills and adding value throughout their working lives. Today, people tend to change jobs several times throughout their working lives, so to maximize their value, they need to be brought up to speed quicker, and companies need strategies to retain knowledge despite labor churn.
• Sustainability pressures are on the rise both in terms of meeting green regulations and ensuring that expensive factories provide a long-term return on investment.

To adapt to these challenges, industry is looking to develop innovative technological solutions.

Opportunities: AI, Digital Twins, Industrial IoT, and Robotics

Having set the scene, Gozzi dove into the types of technologies that industry is pioneering to adapt to challenge, and how they are pushing these technologies beyond their mainstream potential.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Gozzi explained how AI promises to be an industry game changer, especially in the quest to go from automated to adaptive manufacturing. Automated manufacturing can create products based on existing programming, recreating the same product perfectly every time while eliminating human error.

But the goal is to create machines that don’t just create one thing but can create anything, adapting as designs change. Adaptive manufacturing is one of the core goals of Industry 4.0, which is the next Industrial Revolution that is seeing automated, interconnected factories. Gozzi shared a compelling example of applications by Rolls-Royce for airplane engine production.

AI powers machines to handle more complex tasks independently, which requires them to be networked and connected. As a result, factories can collect data from every area and use it to optimize supply chains and resource allocation. This enables predictive maintenance, reducing downtime by around 50%, and scheduling activity, reducing yield losses by around 40%. Since factories represent major investments, maximizing productivity is essential to achieving a strong return on investment (ROI).

This same data is increasingly being used to iterate and test prototypes in the digital twin environment.

Digital Twins

According to Gozzi, today’s factories are created with intelligent interconnected machines that are adaptable and extendable and can provide strategic insights. The entire manufacturing system is connected by silent threads of information that can turn siloed data into a much larger picture.

These threads form the neural network of digital twins, which are virtual replicas of physical systems that can be used to monitor and optimize operations, simulate actions before execution, and accelerate innovation. New production techniques and designs can be tested virtually before being tested in the real world, allowing processes to be optimized for quality and efficiency. Here, Gozzi shared a compelling example from Siemens’ accelerator ecosystem which creates replicas of factories in the metaverse.

IIoT and Robotics

In the factories themselves, manufacturers rely on advanced robotics connected by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to carry out tasks independently. IIoT ensures that a centralized intelligence integrates every element of production in real-time. This not only allows robots to do their jobs but also ensures that issues can be identified and solutions executed through the digital twin. The digital twin can also be used to teach robots new tasks tested and piloted virtually in the digital twin.

Meanwhile, robots must be mobile, AI-driven, and integrated into the factory’s ecosystem. It is AI that has enabled robots to become aware of their environment, enabling new behaviors such as picking pieces from a non-uniform set and placing them where they are required. This may seem small, but it is something that robots have never been able to do and represents one of the biggest recent breakthroughs in manufacturing.

AI is also enabling robots to safely work alongside human workers in manufacturing settings. These collaborative robots, called “cobots,” are another recent development that promises to be transformative.

Cybersecurity

Gozzi explained that all this requires advanced connectivity and a closed network with a “zero trust” architecture to mitigate security threats. Hackers, viruses, and other network failures don’t just represent the potential loss of valuable and confidential data, but also a major safety risk if cobots are interfered with and begin to act unsafely.

Powerful and secure industrial closed networks are being enabled by 5G, but these networks still need to be monitored by cybersecurity continuously in real-time.

The Future of Industry

Industry is modernizing quickly, and technology is playing an increasingly important role. This is manifesting in the development of smart adaptive factories using a mix of AI, advanced robotics, and digital twins. Industrial IoT, strong connected networks, and advanced cybersecurity support this. The demand for talent that understands these technologies and their applications will only increase in the coming years.

Moreover, Gozzi reassures students that there is no question that technology will replace real people in some positions. Humans will still be needed to collaborate and work side by side with robots. This will require people to learn new skills, in particular, a data-driven mindset and approach to problem-solving.

Both OPIT’s BSc in Digital Business and MSc in Digital Business and Innovation are designed to prepare students for these kinds of careers.