- Industry 4.0 is a general term that refers to the integration of digital technologies into manufacturing processes
- Industrial AI is the application of AI techniques to solve critical problems for manufacturing
- Private networks that currently leverage industrial AI use it to create simulations like digital twins
As AI proliferates, a new private 5G and edge AI partnership between two companies you may have never heard of hints at the role private 5G networks will likely play in the industrial AI market.
Indeed, the term "industrial AI" is already starting to replace the familiar term of Industry 4.0, according to SNS Telecoms & IT 5G Research Director Asad Khan.
Industy 4.0 vs. industrial AI
Industry 4.0 is a more general term that refers to the integration of digital technologies into manufacturing processes. Industrial AI is the application of AI techniques, such as machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, search, computer vision, causality and robotics, in combination with industrial subject matter expertise to solve critical problems for the manufacturing industry. Private networks that currently leverage industrial AI use it to create simulations like digital twins.
As to the partnership mentioned above, IP communications company Ecrio, which has also worked with Intel and Verizon, is integrating its AI apparatus with Saviah's 5G equipment to create another private 5G contender. The announcement essentially covers the integration of Ecrio's IMS and voice-over-NR communications and edge AI systems with Saviah's 5G core product to support digital twin and industrial IoT applications, Khan told Fierce.
Saviah has partnerships with multiple Taiwanese RAN vendors, including Askey, Pegatron and Alpha Networks, Khan noted. Interestingly, it is not using 5G radios from Huawei, Nokia or any of the major private network vendors for its systems. Saviah has over 30 private 5G network projects, according to the SNS & IT database.
Most of those projects are in Taiwan, including permanent systems at facilities such as factories, farms, universities and hospitals, as well as a compact backpack-sized system for temporary deployments supporting public safety emergency response, military communications and broadcasting use cases, Khan said. Saviah is also in active discussions with integrators in the U.S. and Western Europe, he added.
Is industrial AI the latest buzzword?
Industrial AI assumes that the digital transformation that Industry 4.0 required has already happened on the factory floor — at least according to marketing teams, said Khan.
“There is clearly a strong marketing push, with terms such as digital transformation and Industry 4.0 increasingly being replaced by ‘industrial AI’,” he said. “At the same time, we're seeing growing adoption of edge AI capabilities in private 5G networks, particularly for use cases such as video analytics and quality inspection.”
Still some analysts still thinking that industrial AI will be more of a piece of private network propaganda puffery than a really serious term — and that AI will play more of a role in private 5G network deployment and management, rather than in use cases like Khan mentioned above.
“I do think AI-enabled private 5G will be a marketing buzzword in 2026,” said Recon Analytics analyst Daryl Schoolar. “Adding AI to the marketing pitch would help in bringing eyeballs back to the topic, especially if AI promises to make deployment and management of those networks easier.”
Private 5G pullback could turn to a comeback
Schoolar noted that the outlook for the private 5G market as the year commences is somewhat “murky.” This is because leading Western vendor Nokia changed its approach to the market late last year, while mobile operators — in the U.S. at least — appear “to be pulling back on their sales efforts,” he said.
The pullback by operators is happening despite the fact that the global private LTE/5G network market is expected to increase from $2 billion in 2024 to $7 billion in 2029, according to Analysys Mason.
Spending on private network is expected to remain a low single digit percentage of overall public mobile network spending, Analysys Mason noted, but just like virtually every other sector in the technology market, adding an AI label to private networking could make it more exciting to some.
AvidThink principal Roy Chua noted that even as private 4G was being heavily promoted a few years ago quite a few industrial use cases had private wireless paired with a local edge computing server or cluster that would perform AI-based functions. Most of those were either systems control — for manufacturing, computer vision, health and safety or security — and powered by predictive AI, the analyst noted.
“With the rise of vision-language models, world models and advances in robotics, I do see more use cases with private wireless that bring the robustness and predictability required for industrial automation across factories, transportation, agriculture and other related verticals,” Chua concluded.