Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to dramatically increase productivity and profitability for commercial and industrial companies by automating responses to events in real time – if companies have the appropriate industrial edge infrastructure on site to deliver the performance the technology requires. AI technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA) make it possible to free up humans from repetitive tasks and instead have them focus on more strategic endeavors. RPA can process vast amounts of data in milliseconds, setting the stage for applications ranging from predictive maintenance to streamlined, digitized production and financial processes. But to be effective, RPA must have access to significant compute resources. And given the real-time nature of the applications in industrial and commercial environments, those compute resources must be local, not in some faraway data center or in the cloud. In short, RPA demands edge computing, which means commercial and industr...
