It’s a funny thing jargon. It stays jargon until precisely that moment it crosses over into the mainstream and — for want of a better scenario — sits just as comfortably in the conversation in your local coffee bar as the current political scandal, the football results or the latest movie at the cinema.

We’ve seen this in the last 12-18 months with the way ChatGPT has infiltrated the narrative and become a common discussion point you’ll overhear while sipping on your drink of choice. In the past, we’ve witnessed similar with ‘AI’, ‘streaming’, ‘The Cloud’ and a whole host of other phrases that originated at the edge of the discourse. No doubt at around 4,000 B.C., ‘wheel’ went through a similar process before it too became accepted and then widely disseminated around the fire pit as its utility became obvious.

Incredible business transformation

I say all this because we’re now in the middle of an incredible business transformation that is introducing a range of new language into the lexicon which will also become mainstream over the course of the next 12-18 months. And naturally, for anyone in business who wants to be at the head of the game, the sooner you get used to the new language of business and understand what it is, the bigger the advantage you will have for this groundbreaking transformation.

‘We’re now in the middle of an incredible business transformation that is introducing a range of new language into the lexicon which will also become mainstream over the course of the next 12-18 months.’

Søren Brogaard, CEO at Trackunit

Let’s start with Industry Cloud Platform. It’s a matter of debate as to who first coined the phrase, but one thing is irrefutable — technology consultant Gartner’s brilliant report on ICPs in the Fall of 2023 crystallized the conversation to a point that imaginations were captured and companies sat up and took notice. 

While some were ahead of the game, it was for many the first time that the concept was introduced. That it came from such an impeccable source only highlighted the significance and no doubt helped hasten companies’ efforts to get to grips with the implications of ICPs, understand what it means for their business and get a handle on what kind of future it might offer.

it’s not difficult to understand why. That Gartner said there would be a 20% rise in spending on public Cloud services to circa USD679 billion in 2024 from 2023 was hardly unexpected, but a prediction that by 2027, “more than 70% of enterprises will use ICPs to accelerate their business initiatives, up from less than 15% in 2023” opened up a potential and a challenge that could not be ignored.

‘The key takeway here is ‘industry’ because in the era of the ICP, it will mean platforms that are specifically tailored to any given industry to provide dedicated, niche services.’

Søren Brogaard, CEO at Trackunit

And the key takeway here is ‘industry’ because in the era of the ICP, it will mean platforms that are specifically tailored to any given industry to provide dedicated, niche services. By building on for want of a better term, the generic Cloud, that is exactly what an ICP will do. 

It’s important to be clear here. An ICP will not replace The Cloud, but it will have its own ecosystem that develops on top of the public version. The ICP will give companies the opportunity to become part of a new, overlapping ecosystem where business processes work more seamlessly, more efficiently and, in the context of construction, play a critical part in enabling the ongoing battle against downtime.

Connect the dots

We’ve focused strongly on machine learning in the past few years relying on Time Series Data (another term you’ll hear more of) to effectively connect the dots and with the advent of Generative AI like ChatGPT, this is also in the process of being been taken to a new level by Large Language Models. LLMs are a deep learning algorithm that can perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks using transformer models and are trained using massive datasets. This enables them to recognize, translate, predict, or generate text or other content.

In construction, that has numerous implications. We at Trackunit, for example, are dealing with something like 2 billion data points daily so LLMs are enabling us to clean and harmonize that data into something useful that plays vertically into the industry. In effect, we’re harnessing AI to take insights to a new level and delivering clean, structured data that is tailored to and actionable specifically to, for example, the construction site, be it access management, emissions reporting or connectivity to name a few.

Using Time Series Data, LLMs matter because they get smarter at understanding the data and placing that in context. That means a record of data over a string of time pertaining to everything including error codes, usage and other important metrics to build a picture of the individual machine with a unique identifier that can then be extrapolated to understand fleets usage and so on. 

And the beauty of this is that all of this is not some abstract, theoretical debate about what might come. This is established and already enabling our partners in the off-highway sector to leverage insights with immediate effect by integrating into that ecosystem. 

Better use of resource

There’s another way to do this of course by — as some of the big players in construction are indeed doing — devoting huge resource, time and effort to building their own platform with the ambition of eventually becoming the ICP for the industry. But is it worth the effort? It’s critical to understand here that a platform is not a project you throw everything at for a year or two, it has to be something that becomes a permanent part of your company. 

‘That means your teams are busy experimenting and developing in partnership with an ICP that is in the vanguard of the movement and pioneering at the edge of the technology. Instead of having to build something at huge cost, you’re buying your way in at a fraction of the cost and putting your business in the best position to take advantage of this revolution.’

Søren Brogaard, CEO at Trackunit

To propel that point even further, it’s what your company has to become. And given that the platform is already there, it makes far more sense and far better use of resource to leverage the existing ICP and build your services and apps as part of that bandwagon.

It allows your data scientists to, literally from day one, roll up the shirt sleeves and get directly into a workbook to start adapting the LLMs in the ICP to suit your business running your own proprietary data set to insert in their own environment, fully classified, fully private, fully isolated data separate from the ICP.

This privacy theme is something I will return to in a future article, but this is surely more rational than trying to build a platform to compete with what’s already there, has a massive headstart and, because it’s really good at what it does and is focused only on that purpose, will only get further ahead.

That means your teams are busy experimenting and developing in partnership with an ICP that is in the vanguard of the movement and pioneering at the edge of the technology. Instead of having to build something at huge cost, you’re buying your way in at a fraction of the cost and putting your business in the best position to take advantage of this revolution.

Remember that reference to the wheel I made earlier? Well, instead of trying to build a better ‘solid’ wheel, some bright spark around BC 2000 stripped out the solidity for the hollowed version we know today, making it significantly lighter. That’s what innovation does. And that’s what being in the vanguard means. 

We’re likely to see similar in the ICP environment and I can guarantee this — we won’t have to wait 2,000 years for the next big jump.

This is part of a series of articles on the emergence of ICPs and what it means for the new business transformation. Read here to see why you need to slow down to understand what is really going on.