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Stories from the Edge: Real-World AI Inferencing at Work

Eric Simone • July 25, 2025

This post from ClearBlade CEO Eric Simone covers a use case for AI inferencing in water management. It first appeared on LinkedIn in his newsletter, Eric on the Edge. ‍

Back in January 2024, I said AI would become the killer app for edge computing. That future is not approaching. It is already here.

Across industries, inferencing models, some trained years ago and others recently updated, are delivering real-time insights at the edge. Not from labs or data centers, but in pump houses, rural treatment plants, and industrial control rooms. This is where AI gets put to work.

‍Consider water management. A Napa Valley water services provider faced a familiar challenge: aging SCADA systems, monthly site visits for compliance, and unreliable connectivity in remote areas. New regulations added 15-minute wastewater reporting requirements. They were stuck between old systems and new demands. ClearBlade helped them move forward. By integrating our edge-native IoT software into their water management web portal, we enabled on-site data collection and AI inferencing without needing cell service or constant power.

The system generates compliance reports, sends alerts when conditions change, and supports remote control of pumps and valves through local dashboards. What once required manual work now runs with less effort and greater consistency. The solution expanded their customer base 7x in under a year.

‍Why it matters:

McKinsey reports that edge AI can reduce latency in industrial processes by up to 98 percent compared to cloud-only models. This level of responsiveness allows teams to act without delay.

ClearBlade has been building for this environment since 2014. We shipped our first edge platform before the term became widely used. Today, we deliver:

Local inferencing that does not depend on connectivity
Two-way control for immediate action
Dashboards tailored to each operation
Deployments that integrate with existing systems

This Stories from the Edge series will focus on how AI is being used today. Not theory. Not pilots. Real outcomes.

The edge is not a trend. It is where the work gets done. Stay tuned.

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ClearBlade provides a complete platform for IoT, Edge AI, and connected Digital Twins, helping enterprises make sense of machine data and act on it in real time. With deployments across 6 million devices in 38 countries, organizations rely on ClearBlade for solutions that are fast to implement, secure, and built to scale. From water and energy management to intelligent buildings, logistics, and predictive maintenance, ClearBlade connects diverse assets, streamlines data flows, and enables AI-driven automation at the edge.