Generative AI Chatbots: IoT Relevance

This post delves into Generative AI Chatbots and the corresponding relevance for IoT.

Last year we all watched as Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) took the world by storm writing outreach emails, summarizing encyclopedias of information, and inserting rainbows into photos. Things got so popular, that a new job description appeared on resumes called “prompt engineering.” Prompt engineering was the delicate balance of asking a GenAI tool a question in multiple nuanced ways until the GenAI spit back just the right combination of words. Like almost everyone else, I was amazed by some of the things we were starting to see.

Like almost everyone else we all started thinking “How does this apply to me? How does this apply to IoT?”

Support

Almost everything we initially saw from GenAI came in a chatbot interface – quickly providing support to user questions with well-written summaries. The immediate analog for many of us was – what if GenAI could answer questions about how to solve problems using not just a large set of documentation but also data from the IoT. Imagine your plumber walked into your house and simply asked, “Hey what’s wrong with the kitchen faucet?” and the response was “It looks like there is sediment buildup in the downstairs hot water heater” followed by human-friendly instructions on how to flush that particular brand and model of heater. It’s a pretty cool way to reduce the diagnosis and maintenance process of the issue, and while much of that solution could work without GenAI providing the answer, in a way that would work for any kitchen sink on any house with any hot water heater.

Display

Next, we see GenAI starting to help us look at our data faster. In the same way in which GenAI creates text in formats we like to read GenAI, with mountains of historical information about how we like to look at our data, has the ability to quickly produce interfaces that are meaningful and accurate. ClearBlade just announced its first version of GenAI in our Intelligent Assets product where we are introducing this Generative AI chatbot capability. Now, you can simply ask the GenAI assistant to “please create five trucks to monitor” and it will build the associated data model with built-in suggestions for common attributes of interest. Future iterations are already showing success at building that dashboard your customer service center is asking for and deploying that rule to alert the field operator when things have gone wrong.

Integration

Without a doubt the hardest part of IoT has been getting things installed and connected. A prolific number of protocols with settings for converting millivolts or tags or registers into something a human can read makes each environment unique. On the other side, every company has picked a different ETL tool or database or customer relations management tool meaning that data once ingested by IoT has to then be converted again and again. GenAI, with its ability to rapidly make sense of many different integrations, has the opportunity to significantly reduce the effort to build all these protocol and middleware connectors. Imagine simply handing your GenAI assistant the manual to your new pump and letting it create the code for pulling the appropriate Modbus registers and mapping them directly into your Intelligent Asset instance.

Summary

With the launch of ClearBlades GenAI Assistant, we see the beginnings of what’s possible with Generative AI chatbots and GenAI more broadly in IoT. We see a huge opportunity to reduce the time to configure new environments while also providing significantly more powerful tools to support the end operators of our systems.

On a final note – a huge shout-out goes to the Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Assets, and Design teams for collaboratively bringing together this powerful capability into an understandable, intuitive framework that will allow us to continue to innovate for many years ahead.