We’ve only scratched the surface of the opportunities AI can deliver. Pair it with IoT, and we see the benefits of AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) push those possibilities even further. By improving efficiency in decision-making and enhancing automation, AIoT can help businesses reduce costs, optimise resources, minimise downtime and even unlock long-term savings.
Moreover, if your business operates in rural or isolated environments where traditional networks are unreliable or unavailable, satellite-enabled AIoT solutions can enhance the visibility, management and maintenance of your remote assets like never before.
In this blog, we take a look at the measurable financial benefits of AIoT and how these translate in real-world scenarios.
For a detailed exploration of the foundations of AIoT, please read our new in-depth blog, AIoT Explained: A Guide to the Future of IoT.
How AIoT Reduces Costs and Maximises Efficiency
One of the most compelling benefits of AIoT is that it can introduce automation and intelligent decision-making to IoT systems, helping your business reduce costs in several valuable ways:
Lower Operational Costs: As AIoT delivers insights on huge volumes of data, it substantially reduces manual labour, streamlining your workflows and reducing errors.
Optimised Resource Usage: Offering real-time data analysis and decision-making, AIoT takes a leap forward in optimising energy, water, and raw materials use, delivering excellent cost savings and improved sustainability for your business.
Here’s how these benefits of AIoT translate in real life:
Smart Agriculture: AIoT can adjust irrigation based on real-time soil data, reducing unnecessary usage and lowering energy costs. With many farms out of reach of terrestrial networks, comprehensive satellite coverage maintains fast, reliable data transmission.
Maritime & Logistics: By analysing navigation routes and reducing idle time, this intelligent technology optimises fuel consumption, another hugely compelling benefit of AIoT. When vehicles or vessels travel out of range of traditional services, satellite IoT steps in to ensure connections remain uninterrupted.
Predictive Maintenance: Preventing Costly Downtime
Traditional manual maintenance strategies are often too reactive, fixing failures after they occur. If your business relies on this approach, it likely incurs high costs and operational inefficiencies.
AIoT offers predictive maintenance, analysing real-time data provided by sensors to predict equipment failures before they happen. According to a report by McKinsey, predictive maintenance can reduce machine downtime by 30-50% and increase equipment lifetime by 20 to 40%, significantly impacting your bottom line.
Here’s how these financial benefits of AIoT play out in industry use cases:
Oil & Gas Pipelines: Leaks in pipelines lead to costly repairs and service disruptions, not to mention possible regulatory fines. Deploy AIoT to your infrastructure to detect faults or pressure anomalies early, and these financial hits can be avoided.
Energy & Utilities: Similarly, AIoT is hugely valuable for utility infrastructure, enabling predictive maintenance by detecting risks early, reducing emergency repair costs and preventing unplanned outages.
With these industries having infrastructure stretching far and wide, satellite connectivity ensures the full potential of AIoT can be harnessed, reliably delivering data no matter how remote the location.
AIoT for Scalability: Reducing CAPEX and OPEX
Another highly attractive financial benefit of AIoT is its efficiency across Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and Operational Expenditure (OPEX) while enabling scalability.
Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) Savings
- As AI technology becomes more and more common, we’re seeing a rise in embedded devices powered by AI-native MCUs (Microcontroller Units). This means that the total cost to enable AI solutions is increasingly accessible to all fields and not only to special use cases.
- By leveraging hybrid networks (terrestrial and satellite) for your AIoT deployments, you can reduce the dependency on expensive new infrastructure rollouts while ensuring the most affordable coverage in different environments.
- By integrating LoRa® into AIoT applications, your business can benefit from its low-power, long-range capabilities, reducing the need for frequent battery replacements or manual servicing.
Operational Expenditure (OPEX) Savings
As well as improving resource usage and reducing labour costs, AIoT offers additional operational cost efficiencies. For example, Firmware Updates Over The Air (FUOTA) eliminates costly on-site maintenance, while adaptive data compression and optimised transmission scheduling minimise bandwidth usage for further savings.
Long-Term ROI and Competitive Advantage
Beyond immediate cost improvements, by investing in AIoT, your business can enjoy long-term financial benefits that enhance resilience and profitability.
The enhanced insight from AIoT enables improvements in wider business strategies. It also supports steps towards improved sustainability and achievement of your ESG targets. Furthermore, by adopting AIoT in these early stages, your business gains a competitive edge, future-proofing your operations and ensuring you stay ahead in an increasingly automated, data-driven economy.
The financial benefits of AIoT are tangible, making it a strategic investment for any organisation. For those business operations in remote regions where assets can be hard to reach, satellite connectivity provides coverage anywhere, anytime to deliver the benefits of AI for smarter, faster and more accurate operations that are ready for future challenges.
With our LoRa®-enabled satellite IoT network, we are already helping organisations experience the financial benefits of intelligent, always-connected IoT solutions. To learn more, please get in touch with our team.