Transforming industrial decision making with AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant

In today’s fast-paced industrial landscape, the ability to quickly access and interpret critical information can mean the difference between smooth operations and costly downtime. Many organizations find themselves struggling with fragmented data spread across various dashboards and documents, making it challenging to gain comprehensive insights in a timely manner. We are excited to announce the general availability of AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant, a new feature in AWS IoT SiteWise designed to improve how industrial users interact with their operational data and get insights.

Unlock your IoT data with AWS

AWS offers a range of specialized IoT services that enable innovative solutions across industries such as manufacturing, consumer products, automotive, and healthcare. AWS IoT services help you accelerate innovation, secure your IoT applications from the cloud to the edge, and offers superior AI and ML integration, easily and at scale. This past year, AWS was recognized as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Global Industrial IoT Platforms for its ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Global Industrial IoT Platforms

AWS IoT SiteWise is a purpose-built, managed IoT service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale to help you make better, data-driven decisions. AWS IoT SiteWise empowers companies to efficiently gather data from a wide array of industrial equipment and processes, model this data to accurately represent their assets and facilities, process and analyze information in real-time, visualize operations through intuitive built-in tools, and seamlessly integrate with other AWS services for advanced analytics and machine learning applications.

The introduction of AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant builds upon this robust data foundation. By consolidating dispersed information and adapting it to meet diverse user needs, the Assistant tackles the complexities of modern industrial environments providing a unified approach for industrial data understanding and analysis through contextualized summarization of your industrial environment, deep-dive into insights with Q&A, and data analysis to accelerate decision-making.

Figure 2: AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant in SiteWise Monitor Dashboard

Key Features of AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant

Summarization: Cut through the noise

In industrial settings, crucial information is often scattered across multiple dashboards and documents, making it challenging for industrial users to quickly grasp the full picture of their operations. The summarization feature of AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant addresses these issues by allowing users to quickly digest the essence of complex situations, providing concise, contextual summaries at a glance. It leverages contextual understanding of your industrial environment, taking into account asset relationships, historical data, equipment user manual, and your organization’s standard operating procedures, to deliver meaningful insights tailored to your specific industrial setup. The contextual awareness of AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant ensures that summaries remain relevant and actionable as your knowledge bases and operations grow and evolve.

Imagine you are a plant manager starting your shift. You need to check how operations are running in the factory. Instead of spending valuable time sifting through pages of data across various dashboards, with AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant you can receive a clear, comprehensive summary of an active alert or alarms within your facility. You can get an instant overview highlighting critical issues, affected assets, and potential impacts, enabling swift prioritization and resource allocation, enhancing operational efficiency.

Figure 3: AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant summarizing an Alarm on the dashboard

Deep-dive: Uncover Insights with Q&A

Summarization provides a quick, comprehensive overview of your area of interest in the operations, but sometimes complex industrial environments require a more detailed investigation. With AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant, users can engage in natural language, Q&A conversations with the assistant, asking follow-up questions to drill down into specific issues or explore related data points. This feature addresses the challenge of diverse user experience needs. Instead of creating and maintaining multiple bespoke dashboards for different roles or use-cases, the AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant provides a flexible, natural language interface that adapts to various user requirements. For instance, after reviewing the summary of a warning alarm, a maintenance technician might ask, “What’s the historical performance of this asset?” or “Are there any similar alarms in our records?” The assistant, leveraging its deep integration with AWS IoT SiteWise data and your organization’s knowledge base, provides detailed, contextual answers. This Q&A deep dive allows asking follow-up questions while staying in that context of the conversation.

Figure 4: AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant in a deep-dive with follow-up Q/A

Analysis: Accelerating Decision-Making

AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant combines summarization and deep-dive capabilities to accelerate analysis and decision-making. By providing both high-level overviews and detailed insights on demand, the assistant empowers industrial users to make informed decisions quickly and confidently, even as their knowledge base grows and evolves.

Consider a quality engineer investigating a production anomaly. They start with a summary of recent alarms and production data. Noticing a pattern, they use the Q&A feature to explore historical data, correlate events, and analyze potential causes. Within minutes, they’ve gathered insights that might have taken hours to compile manually from various dashboards and documents. This rapid analysis leads to faster problem resolution and improved operational efficiency.

Figure 5: AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant providing troubleshooting recommendations

Seamless Integration and Accessibility

Understanding that different organizations have varying needs and technical capabilities, we’ve designed the AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant to be flexible and easy to integrate into existing workflows and systems. We offer three primary integration options:

• New APIs for Custom Solutions: Developers can access the AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant’s capabilities on-demand through new APIs, enabling seamless integration into existing IoT applications.
• Updated IoT AppKit Widgets: Enhanced our IoT AppKit with Assistant-aware widgets, such as Chatbots, Line Charts, and KPI Gauges that make it easy to add AI-powered insights to your dashboards and applications without extensive development work.
• Preview of Assistant-aware SiteWise Monitor Portal: The Assistant-aware SiteWise Monitor Portal offers an intuitive interface that allows you to visualize key data-driven insights without writing code. This helps industrial users to build a quick dashboard on the industrial data of interest in AWS IoT SiteWise, and start interacting with it directly with SiteWise Assistant. This portal makes the Assistant’s capabilities accessible to users across your organization, regardless of their technical expertise. This feature is currently in Preview.

These integration options ensure that AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant can adapt to your existing infrastructure while providing a unified interface for accessing dispersed information, simplifying access to insights for everyone.

Security and Privacy

Industrial data is often sensitive and proprietary. AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant operates entirely within your AWS environment, ensuring your data never leaves your control. Only your own data and documentation that is managed in your account is leveraged, so you can be confident that your information is not shared across different customers or industries.

AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant only queries the data based on operational context in AWS IoT SiteWise and uses it as a reference to look for more information in the configured knowledge base through Amazon Kendra Indexes. Your Standard Operating Procedures, manuals, and other knowledge base documents stay where they are – not replicated in AWS IoT SiteWise – further enhancing the security and privacy of your enterprise knowledge context. For any guidance provided, you receive source information for verification or audit purposes.

Figure 6: AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant providing sources citation

Conclusion

The AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant is a paradigm shift in industrial data interaction. By enabling users to summarize complex situations, deep-dive into the data with natural language queries, and rapidly analyze information, it paves the way for smarter, faster decision-making in industrial environments. It addresses the key challenges of spread-out context, growing knowledge bases, and diverse user experience needs, providing a unified, adaptable solution for modern industrial operations.

To learn more visit the feature page and Getting Started guide.