- Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) opened the center to bring companies in physical touch with what IoT and AI can do for their facilities or products.
- Solutions include everything from smart manufacturing and sustainability to digital twins of patients or athletes’ hearts.
Companies are testing a wide variety of IoT solutions, often leveraging AI, at a new Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) facility in Cincinnati—from smart farming and manufacture to creating digital twins of human hearts.
The “Bringing Life to Things Lab” is intended to let companies better innovate with TCS on potential solutions that employ the latest in IoT and sensor technology with AI. The lab also features 5G, digital twins, AR/VR, and cognitive robotics.
TCS is a global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization headquartered in India. Its Ohio-based IoT and digital engineering lab, which opened in April, serves as a North American hub for developing, testing and deploying IoT, AI and GenAI solutions. It is intended for innovation on solutions for health care and life sciences, manufacturing, energy and resources, consumer packaged goods, travel, transportation, retail and utilities.
Some key areas of focus at the lab include the factory of the future, personalized medicine, intelligent autonomous vehicles and sustainability, said Regu Ayyaswamy, TCS’s Head of IoT. Some of TCS’ technology on display include its TCS Clever Energy, Digital Manufacturing Platform (DMP) and TCS Digifleet.
Serving Customers with Lab Access
TCS has seen near double-digital growth in its IoT division over the last year, said Ayyaswamy. That growth is being driven by potential customers who have IoT requirements and unique use cases. In fact, Ayyaswamy noted that its customers have moved beyond the proof of concept or proof of value efforts to deploying a full solution across an entire factory or other enterprises.
As a result of the new solutions and challenges before end users, the company is now focused on “how do we give our customers a physical space in which to come talk about—and feel—the technology,” said Ayyaswamy.
TCS’s 220-acre campus in Cincinnati houses 1,000 staffers, including engineers developing IoT solutions. These technology solutions being built are designed to serve value stream, end-to-end applications, using sensors, IoT Connectivity and AI or GenAI to manage the data.
Solutions Across Industries
The lab highlights varied solutions across multiple industries from healthcare and agriculture to manufacturing and automotive. “We’re inviting customers, analysts, anyone who potentially wants to engage with TCS [on IoT solutions],” according to Ayyaswamy.
Users can bring their own innovation and design, or simply come with challenges they need to overcome. “Then we will be able to really connect the dots and bring them the right level of solution,” he added.
In manufacturing, TCS’ digital manufacturing platform provides a solution for digitizing control systems with sensors that measure conditions, connect to equipment PLCs to enable smarter controls, but to model data over time for improved efficiency or reduced maintenance costs as well.
One example cited by Ayyaswamy is in the chemical industry in which a company has a cooling tower that needs to be closely monitored. “You can create a digital twin of the carbonation tower that will optimize that process,” he said, while the components within the facility or tower could also have digital twins. In that way a company’s IoT solution can help predict anomalies and then from the anomalies it can also give alerts of an impending failure, or a preventive action that should be taken.
Personalized Medicine with Digital Twin
For human health, the TCS lab demonstrates how AI-powered digital twin technology can transform how athletes train and compete by measuring and monitoring the heart while functioning in strenuous conditions. The company aims to demonstrate how AI-powered digital twin technology can transform athlete training by measuring and monitoring the heart’s performance in real time.
One example is TCS’ creation of what it calls the first digital heart of a professional runner. In 2023, the company released a virtual replica of the heart of Olympic runner Desiree “Des” Linden.
Beyond athletics, this technology has the potential to transform healthcare as well. By leveraging wearable devices and sensors, an IoT system and AI can gather and deploy patient data to perform real-time analyses, preventing the development or progression of medical conditions.
Improving Auto Testing and Development
In the automotive industry, TCS customers are exploring IoT technology to speed up the design, development, and validation of Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs). The technology can use GenAI and object detection to track people, vehicles and other hazards in a car’s path.
The technology is being investigated for autonomous car development. Traditionally new car models are sent through physical testing in various terrain and conditions.
TCS is using generative AI to augment that process with digital data. For instance, a system could create a virtual weather condition such as fog or snow in the environment, using generative AI without actually driving that car in those conditions.
Smarter Agriculture and Sustainability
Another field TCLS is offers its solutions is in agriculture—working to improve harvest yield, improve efficiency and provide intelligence from farm to retail. For instance, Ayyaswamy pointed to an image and video analytics solution in which a large potato supplier could use cameras and sensors to grade potatoes as they are processed according to details such as size, color and consistency. In that way they can be more easily sorted and forwarded to the appropriate customer.
The lab can provide sustainability by design to help companies understand and innovate around IoT and AI technology to reduce environmental impact of various operations. TCS’ intelligent power plant, for instance, helps optimize power plant efficiencies and provide digital distributed energy management systems
Going forward, the company may add new applications in the lab, said Ayyaswamy “we will continue to refresh our lab with new challenges and engineers” and will employ five to six interns from American universities each year.
Four Pillar Business Unit
Within TCS’ IoT business unit, their efforts have been classified into four pillars—all of which have presence in the new lab.
The first pillar is the intelligent product to bring connectivity to goods as they move through an ecosystem or are used by a customer. For instance, sensors on consumer products, automotive components or medical devices—even utilities smart meters create intelligence and visibility into that item or asset.
Secondly, the company offers its connected plant, for discreet or process manufacturing to connect sensor data either on a server on-premise or in the cloud to actually bring a more process centric view.
The third pillar is connected services which can provide cloud-based connectivity services for use in applications. Case uses include remote patient monitoring or logistics tracking with cold-chain containers.
Lastly, the fourth pillar centers around a digital thread connecting information about a component or product from engineering to manufacturing to the service. In that way, manufacturers and their designers and engineers have a view into the entire life and operation of a particular product or component to better understand how it is operating, and how to trace back issues if the product fails or requires service.
Answering Questions about IoT, AI
In the two months since the lab opened, customers are local as well as those flying from the East Coast and beyond, have been visiting the site.
“I think there are a lot of questions customers generally have, whenever we talk to them. So what we wanted to provide was an environment where they can come and have a more physical and digital kind of experience,” Ayyaswamy said.