AI is a matter of power, infrastructure and security: TechEx North America

Although visitors to an event like TechEx North America will always want to see the cutting edge front and centre stage, the nuance and detail brought to the show by the speakers and exhibitors mean that it’s sometimes the smaller considerations that need to play big – at least, in the minds of enterprise decision-makers.

Across the different tracks of Edge Computing, IoT, Data Centre Congress, and Cyber Security, the question was about what needs to be built around AI before it takes its place in the physical, business-oriented world?

The Edge Computing track, with its roots in traditional industries, looked at latency, deployment discipline, and cybersecurity for IIoT/IT amalgams. The day-one programme positioned edge computing as a place where companies can reassess the value of their data assets, look at how decisions are made by autonomous equipment, and the required speed of processing.

Sessions looked at scaling edge deployments (in multi-site businesses, for example), agentic network operations, distributed inference – on-prem, in-cloud or hybrid – immutable edge infrastructure, and how zero-trust cybersecurity lessons can be applied to control systems.

Ed Doran of the Edge AI Foundation chaired a programme that had as i...