Industrial IoT & Digital Twins: Building the Factory of the Future

Chairpersons welcome and opening remarks

Discover how the next-generation smart factory is redefining manufacturing through automation, connectivity, and data-driven decision-making. This session highlights the latest technology trends, operational strategies, and market forces shaping the future, offering leaders insights into opportunities to boost productivity, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge.

Join industry executives, innovators, and technology leaders for a dynamic discussion on how IIoT is transforming manufacturing operations. This panel explores real-world applications, measurable business impact, and the challenges of integrating connected devices, offering insights that will help attendees unlock efficiency, drive innovation, and accelerate digital transformation in their own facilities.

Industrial IoT and Digital twin were always critical tools for enabling the vision for Industry 4.0. The hyper-connectivity promised by Industry 4.0 is just part of the story. In this session Bryce Barnes, Senior Director, leading LG CNS Americas, Smart Factory business will explore how AI super-charges Industrial IoT and Digital Twin technologies. He will describe AI’s role in enabling industrial software platforms to deliver us beyond the vision of Industry 4.0 towards Smart Factories that are highly automated, flexible, resilient and increasingly autonomous.

Explore how AI is moving from concept to the factory floor, enabling faster, smarter operational decisions than ever before. Through real-world examples, this session highlights how predictive maintenance, automated quality control, and real-time optimization are transforming production lines and delivering measurable business impact.

74% of manufacturers get stuck in pilot purgatory, and the database is usually where it falls apart first. This session breaks down the performance envelope that every IIoT system hits when scaling from PoC to production: storage costs that compound quadratically, ingest bottlenecks that appear without warning, and query degradation that turns real-time dashboards into loading screens. You’ll learn how to map your system’s limits before you hit them and what architectural choices actually move the ceiling instead of just buying time.

This session outlines a practical roadmap for industrial leaders to bridge the gap between frontline execution and AI by first digitizing work and connecting machine data. It focuses on turning real-time signals from equipment into automated, prioritized workflows that drive measurable improvements in uptime and labor efficiency. Attendees will walk away with a clear sequencing framework to build a trustworthy data foundation and an executive scorecard to prove the ROI of their digital transformation.

Industrial operations are moving from connected devices, dashboards, and automation toward Physical AI, where IoT data, edge systems, digital twins, and AI agents work together to sense, reason, and act in real-world environments. This session will cover how enterprise leaders can move from passive monitoring to agentic decision systems across factories, supply chains, maintenance, quality, safety, and operational workflows while maintaining security, reliability, human oversight, and production-grade governance.

Enterprises have invested heavily in digitization, yet many still lack control over the physical assets that keep operations moving. While AI dominates boardroom conversations, organizations often miss a foundational layer: intelligent management of returnable and mobile assets. Without it, predictive models lack reliable ground truth, automation stalls, and ROI remains fragmented.

This session bridges high-level AI ambition with operational reality, showing how connected asset intelligence enables closed-loop orchestration, reduces shrink and working capital drag, and transforms supply chains from reactive tracking systems into autonomous, outcome-driven networks.

Most IoT devices still pass multiple quality gates — but firmware security is rarely one of them. This session introduces the concept of a binary-first cybersecurity gate that automatically generates SBOMs, detects vulnerabilities, and enables continuous compliance with regulations such as the Cyber Resilience Act and IEC 62443. Attendees will learn how manufacturers and operators can integrate automated firmware analysis into their development lifecycle to reduce risk, accelerate certification, and prevent costly field incidents.

This session traces the path of how digital twins have evolved spanning three generations — The first generation of digital twins created high-fidelity virtual models with synchronized interaction to the physical world through IoT sensors, emphasizing real-time monitoring, visualization, and situational awareness providing event intelligence. The second generation added machine learning and analytics across the digital thread emphasizing the data flow, to move from condition monitoring to prediction, prevention, and operational optimization. The third generation introduces generative capabilities that synthesize system designs, configurations and operational scenarios with real time interactions, enabling decision-support and increasingly autonomous operations while keeping humans in or on the loop.

Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of how to begin a digital twin journey using a dual development capabilities-based workflow, how the digital thread connects and persists data across the digital twin lifecycle, and how multi-agent systems, built on a trusted governance framework, can be applied to solve real operational problems —as illustrated through real world use cases in manufacturing, infrastructure, energy, and logistics.

Join a panel of executives and technology innovators as they explore how digital twins are reshaping industrial operations. This discussion will cover practical applications, real-world lessons, and measurable business benefits, offering leaders insight into how to deploy digital twins strategically to enhance productivity, reduce risk, and drive innovation.

As the Industrial AI track draws to a close, this fireside chat brings together two leaders at the forefront of physical AI deployment across industrial environments and public infrastructure, to examine the shared architectural challenges, deployment lessons, and convergence points connecting these two domains.

The sensor fusion, real-time inference, and autonomous decision-making systems now mature in manufacturing and logistics are increasingly being applied to transit networks, civic infrastructure, and urban environments at scale. This session examines what transfers, what does not, and what that means for engineering and technology leaders driving physical AI adoption in both contexts.

The conversation will address:

Adapting industrial-grade physical AI platforms and pipelines for dynamic, human-centred public environments
Technical and operational lessons from industrial deployment applied to smart city infrastructure
Digital twin architectures across operational optimisation and city-scale simulation
Governance frameworks and safety considerations when physical AI systems operate outside controlled environments
Priorities for technical and engineering leaders across both sectors heading into 2025

This session is designed to close Day 1 with technical grounding and strategic perspective, ahead of Day 2.