Industry tech winners will be those who integrate

The industry winners in the tech boom will be those who integrate new systems into existing workflows, coordinate cross-functional teams and scale solutions in real operating conditions, according to a new World Economic Forum (WEF) report.

The advantage lies in moving away from owning technology assets to coordinating capabilities across partners, with convergence reshaping entire value chains not just products.

“When technologies combine, they shift bottlenecks and change where value, power and risk sit across the ecosystem,” the report states.

This makes convergence a leadership and operational issue, not solely a technological one.

Organisations that build the ability to integrate technologies, align teams and work effectively with partners are the ones that achieve scale. When that happens, solutions improve with use, adoption accelerates and convergence becomes a source of advantage, it adds.

The learnings come as the energy industry is grappling with how best to use the eight advanced technology domains – AI, spatial intelligence, next-gen energy, Omni compute, robotics, quantum, engineering biology and advanced materials.

Converging new technologies in established industries, with their legacy systems, is highly complex. Alongside capital investment, firms must also weigh up that merging physical and digital systems creates .

Industrial gas firms are embracing AI for predictive maintenance, plant optimisation and process control, supply chain and logistics efficiencies and safety & quality control.

The industrial gas and oil sector is rapidly adopting robotics, with the market projected to reach $205.5bn by 2030 according to GlobalData. Robotics and AI are set to drive across all industrial sectors.

The WEF report says companies require two forms of orchestration: internal orchestration that aligns an organisation’s own technology, data and people into a single coordinated system; and external orchestration that connects it to capabilities across an ecosystem beyond traditional technologies and domains.