How often have I said that network vendors try to sell their products in a sort of missionless vacuum? How often have I wondered why they didn’t try to create something between what they traditionally sell (which is network gear) and what the buyer wants (which is a business improvement)? Well, Nokia has been trying to do just that with its initiatives in industrial automation and empowering skilled trade/craft workers, and it’s extending its efforts now with MX Workmate.
The problem Nokia is addressing is the lack of attention that’s been given to empowering industrial-focused skilled workers. The mechanism is a suite of what Nokia calls “operational technology” (OT) tools, whose goal is to facilitate the way that these industrial workers interact with the machines they use. To use their press release language, “MX Workmate leverages Generative AI (GenAI) and large language module (LLM) technologies to generate contextual, human-like language content based on real-time OT data, enabling workers to understand complex machines, get real time status information and industries to achieve greater flexibility, productivity, sustainability, as well as improve worker safety.” I’d characterize it as a kind of translator between the world of IT and the world of OT, technology that presumes that tech literacy among industrial workers isn’t any further advanced than it is for the workforce at large.
This isn’t Nokia’s first excursion into the industrial space. I blogged about them HERE, HERE, and HERE, with the last two being the most significant to the OT topic. The three blogs trace an evolution in Nokia thinking, from “enterprise is essential” to “facilities automation is essential” and finally to “worker empowerment in the OT space is essential to facilities automation.” My view was that Nokia was working hard to open up the notion of empowering a sector of the job market that nobody had really paid much attention to. I think that’s pretty obvious in MX Workmate.
The “MX” piece is a reference to the MX Industrial Edge (MXIE) solution Nokia had already announced. Workmate uses LLM/generative-AI technology to operate on the data that’s fed by MXIE. If you base things on the last blog I referenced above, MXIE is based on digital-twin-industrial-metaverse technology that’s now “visualized” through MX Workmate. Workers can query MXIE in plain language and get plain-language results back. I think that the way MX Workmate is described shows the normal-at-this-point vendor emphasis on AI progress, but deeper down it’s a link between digital twin, metaverse, and AI. This isn’t to say that AI is just a glamour add-on here, because it’s a smart and important extension to the story.
Metaversing is a combination of modeling and “visualization”, and I’ve put the term in quotes because the traditional social-metaverse model does in fact focus on creating a visual output. That’s only because of the application, though. Going way back to the concept I presented to a VC decades ago (without success), a metaverse should really be capable of being visualized in many different ways, which means that the model should expose APIs that connect to a “visualizer” component that’s really only loosely coupled to the model. I think that’s what Nokia has done here.
I’d also bet that Nokia has other forms of “visualization” in mind, and even being worked on. Generative AI, after all, generates things, not always text. Image and audio generation are already being used in applications, so I’ll bet that MX Workmate will end up painting images of industrial environments and talking to workers shortly. This is the next step in an evolution that Nokia has clearly been planning for quite a while, and that Nokia is developing in a thoughtful way.
Could this lead all the way to AR/VR goggles and real-time, real-world, visualization? In theory, it could, because if you want to empower non-desk-type workers, the real world is what they move around in, and a lot of what they do involves interacting with real-world elements. Might visualizing all that help them? Yes, it might, but we have to see metaverses as a kind of slow climb upward, not a rocket-like ascent. I don’t see Nokia taking on something that complex at the early stages, and they might in fact prefer that someone else does that. So we’re back to the notion that Nokia is heading for visualization in easy steps, doing the right thing.
Well, they are at the technical level. The announcement was made on the day of the press release I’ve linked to, obviously. I went to Nokia’s homepage immediately, because one of my hard-and-fast rules of marketing is that when you do something that has editorial significance (which is what a press release aims at) you link to it very visibly on your website. I went there, and that’s what most of Nokia’s prospects and even the media/analyst community at large would perhaps do. I didn’t find it. I did a search on MX Workmate, and it linked to a page on which I could find no reference either. I had to go to the newsroom to find the press release. At the end of the press release are three links, and the first one (to MX Workmate) is broken. This is an unfortunate miss that’s linked to what’s technically a really good story. Why make an announcement to a media that either covers it immediately or forgets you, and then have a broken link to the details?
It’s not surprising, though. Tech vendors focusing on B2B in general, and network vendors in particular, have gotten weaker and weaker in marketing over the last couple decades. Nokia is no different from the others, and in fact given the technical strength of their technology here, they’re probably a little better. Media/PR crap has no inertia; you can turn on a dime and fix it in a second. When you let myopia intrude on your product planning you’re in much bigger trouble. But there is an issue here that Nokia has to deal with, and it’s not only learning about marketing and what I call “trajectory management.” It’s about enterprises.
Almost all the world’s telco and network operator revenue opportunity is concentrated in about fifty buyers. Nokia knows them all, and they all know Nokia. For the largest half of that group, at least, Nokia and its competitors have dedicated account teams. They don’t need their accounts to read media stories, they don’t need them to read web material, they don’t need them to read at all. They can simply tell them. But now consider the enterprise. Manufacturing revenue is spread across literally thousands of companies. Nokia is probably known to most of them, but Nokia’s enterprise story is not. Nokia doesn’t have account teams on any significant portion of those thousands either, so they’ll have to get invited to make a sales call. How does that happen?
I’m chatting at least occasionally with some industrial companies that Nokia is in contact with, working with. They’re doing a good job with them in the main, and they’re developing reference accounts. All that is good, and it will eventually serve to disseminate Nokia’s message, but that will take time, and time is something Nokia might not have. There are companies who will spend as much effort as I have to find information on MX Workmate. Nokia’s competitors. And no, not the other network vendors.
The tech vendors who have the most, in fact pretty much the only, influence on industrial projects are the computer and software vendors. The former group are the ones most likely to have enduring account-team relationships with the kind of buyers who would be most interested in MX Workmate. IBM, HPE, and Dell are examples, but the cloud providers could also represent competitive threats. Anyone with AI, with IoT, and in particular with a position in both is a threat. The problem with hiding a light under a bushel is that it doesn’t hide all the light, as anyone who actually tried it knows. The more light there is, the more escapes, and every time Nokia makes their story better it makes it more likely a competitor will decide to take their shot.
An arm’s race in digital-twin, metaverse, and AI would be great for the market. Not so great for Nokia, and since they’re the ones showing the technical initiative it would be shame for them to lose out. The good news? Back to my comment on inertia. It will be easy for Nokia to fix a marketing problem, and way less than easy for competitors to actually produce something insightful. But it won’t take forever, so Nokia needs to get moving.
