What to expect from digital twins in 2023
Read time: ~3-4 mins
For some of us, our digital twin journey is now 5 years old, and our digital transformation journey is nearly 10 years old. In 2023, we come to market with a new business to create and maintain practical and valuable digital twins - so looking forward this year, we have some predictions for the market:
The hype curve is real and customers will demand value
Categories of Digital Twins are starting to emerge
Every enterprise software and digital transformation vendor will sell or build a Digital Twin as part of their offering
The first transformation stories will start to appear
The hype curve is real and customers will demand value
Digital twins (Twins) aren’t new, and most large industrial companies have now experimented with them
The hype curve is playing out, and some companies have now implemented multiple experiments, many of which are very different from each other. These multiple experiments down multiple avenues have prevented coherent learnings, and the trough is looming large
The combination of many types of Twins and many definitions of Twins is spreading the category very wide before it gets deep traction
Twins are still often bought through innovation budgets, not operational budgets, or built through project budgets, and not carried over to O&M
The theories and experiments outweigh value by orders of magnitude, and this will need to change.
From innovation to operations, will become the mantra of many.
Categories of Digital Twins are starting to emerge
We’re seeing different types of Twins emerge, though they’re often not branded or positioned as being different, and the ones that are branded are usually done so by the vendor who is trying to push their category e.g. GIS co’s branding Spatial DTs that are existing GIS products
Possible Twin categories include:
Product Twins
Asset Twins
Process Twins
Engineering Twins
Spatial Twins
Categorisation is the sign of a maturing new space, and will initially create more confusion, but will be beneficial in years to come
Every enterprise software and digital transformation vendor will sell or build a Digital Twin as part of their offering
As part of the move beyond innovation, tenders and scopes of work (SOW) for new Twins will become more frequent
These SOWs will be radically different from each other, sometimes inside the same organisation
All software vendors and service providers will add Digital Twins to their website so they have a ticket to play
Companies that move to tenders with well defined SOW before they know what problem they’re trying to solve will create real problems for themselves
The big consulting firms will keep moving “upmarket” to the industrial metaverse
The first transformation stories will start to appear
We’re >10 years into the Digital Twin paradigm, and about 5 years into mainstream use
Typical digital transformation projects often take 2-3 years to play out from conception, and usually iterate within larger transformation programs of 5 years or more
We’ll see the first financial results from Twins start to emerge in the next 12-24 mths, and the first stories of fundamental changes of how people work (i.e. tangible ROIs).
Niche results will feed into categorisation and accelerate the innovation to operations mantra, but may not create fundamental learnings
In summary, our 2023 Digital Twin market predictions are:
Categories of Twins will start to emerge and we’ll see “market maps” appear
Enterprise software vendors will add a “digital twin” to their “ecosystem”
Digital Twin product vendors will narrow down to niches to focus on near term tangible value
Service vendors will go upmarket to the metaverse and offer everything to everyone
The first stories of fundamental changes in how people work will emerge
We’ll still be vigorously debating what a Twin is in Jan 2024…
If you’re keen to get ahead of the curve and well equipped for 2023, click below to speak with the Geminum Team who can help today!