- Digital twins hold a ton of promise, but haven't quite taken off as expected
- Honeywell exec Greg Turner attributed this in part to cost
- AI could help make it cheaper to build and maintain digital twins, he said
Anyone who’s been around the tech and telecom industry long enough can name at least a handful of big ideas that never quite lived up to their potential. Think extended reality (XR), foldable phones, the metaverse and – dare we say – 5G and network APIs. There’s one more to add to the list: digital twins. But AI could flip this flop.
To hear Honeywell VP and Chief Solutions Engineering Officer Greg Turner tell it, there have been two major problems with digital twins that have thus far prevented the market from taking off.
The first, he said, is that they have lacked the practical functionality customers need. Sure, digital twins offered customers beautiful 3-D renditions of their facilities, but the twins couldn’t help them model how to operate a building more efficiently.
Thankfully, that’s changing. “Digital twins evolving into true, functional twins that you can use to run simulations has been a really key evolution,” Turner said. “Some of the digital twins I see today don’t even have a visual rendering of the building. They really are just functional simulations. And for a lot of our customers that’s actually more valuable.”
Second – and perhaps more importantly from an adoption standpoint – digital twins have been ridiculously expensive to build and maintain.
Turner said one hospital customer in Texas he worked with wanted to build a digital twin of its building but received an estimate that it would cost $800,000 to $1 million per year to maintain it.
“They went ‘wow, I’d have to get an awful lot of productivity to be able to justify spending $1 million a year to maintain my digital twin,’” Turner said. But AI is turning the tables.
“What is going to happen with AI is it’s going to make the cost of maintaining and managing that twin vastly less expensive, and so digital twins will finally become more practical,” he concluded.
The World Economic Forum noted digital twins can serve a variety of use cases, including physical security, network management, cybersecurity, sustainability efforts and supply chain risk mitigation. And according to Gartner, the market for digital twin software and services has the potential to hit $379 billion by 2034.