GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt chatted with Mad Money‘s Jim Cramer about how the digital future will embed in industrial companies to create “trillions of dollars of wealth” in the industrial internet in the coming decade. By industrial internet Immelt means how data collected via emerging technologies works together with large industrial products to achieve massive efficiency. Immelt described an aircraft as a “flying data center.” He said a “locomotive” was a “rolling data center.”
GE, which introduced the term “industrial internet,” claims leadership in the field. Strangely, Immelt said “maybe we think of ourselves or people think of us as an old industrial company. Those days are over.” It’s an unusual admission for Immelt to say that GE may still misjudge itself concerning what kind of company it is. Part of Immelt’s job is to make sure GE knows what it is. If Immelt has his way, every GE employee will know that GE is a company that makes leading edge industrial products that harvest data to deliver huge amounts of actionable information to the customers to increase efficiency in multiple ways. That’s not an “old industrial company.”
