Around 70% of the world’s current gross domestic product (GDP) – valued at $32.3-trillion – will steadily be impacted by the industrial Internet revolution, Industrial Internet Consortium executive director Dr Richard Soley said on Tuesday.

Addressing delegates at the Connected Africa conference, in Sandton, he said the Internet revolution had not changed everything – and the world needed to brace for the third revolution that would lead the next economic transformation.

“We had the industrial revolution, [which saw machines and factories leading to new economies of scale and] then the Internet revolution, [wherein computing and communication technology shifted the structure of commerce and society]. Now we will see industrial systems combined with the Internet strengths,” Soley explained, pointing out that the “measurable outcome” would be in the trillions of dollars.

The Internet revolution had fallen short of its transformational potential with much more still to be done; however, the industrial Internet revolution, which the world was now at the threshold of, had the potential to transform the way the world works.

The industrial Internet – building on the industrial and Internet revolutions – would target “intelligent” objects, systems and decision-making, resulting in “large productivity gains, reduced operating costs and economic growth”.

Soley noted that the McKinsey Global Institute estimated an economic impact of $2.7-trillion to $6.2-trillion a year by 2025, with Gartner indicating that smart machines could replace one in three knowledge workers by 2020.

One of the consortium members, General Electric (GE), forecast an addition of between $10-trillion and $15-trillion to the global GDP over the next 20 years.

“If, conservatively, the industrial Internet achieves a 1% process efficiency, it will translate into billions in savings in every industry,” an Industrial Internet Consortium White Paper suggested.

Soley, citing GE savings estimates for the industrial Internet revolution, explained that a 1% fuel saving in the commercial aviation and gas-fired power generation sectors would lead to savings of $30-billion and $66-billion respectively over a 15-year period.

Over the same period, a 1% reduction in the system inefficiencies of healthcare and freight rail sectors would see savings of $63-billion and $27-billion respectively. A 1% reduction in capital expenditure in the oil and gas exploration and development sector would result in savings of $90-billion.

“This is a market worth going after. Beyond the numbers the industrial Internet is changing how things works,” he assured.

The Industrial Internet Consortium, founded in March 2014 by AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel, planned to bring together industry, government, academia and society to collaborate, innovate and develop standards and strategies to accelerate the growth of the industrial Internet.

The 170-member consortium claimed that about 99% of things in the digital world remained unconnected.

“Through the industrial Internet, companies will shift from responding to events and will instead use connected machines, big data and analytics to predict and plan, resulting in large gains in industrial productivity, bottom line results and societal outcomes,” the paper highlighted.