Emerging Technologies

Emerging technologies are generally described as innovative technologies that make improvements compared to more traditional technologies and that are already established but have not yet reached their maximum maturity level, so they are still in the process of development.

We periodically explore these technologies to identify those that exist on the market that have a adequate level of maturity to be implementable and to contribute a differential value or a competitive advantage to our business.

Once the technologies of greatest interest to us are identified, the emerging technologies area of the Digital Hub has a specialized team to acquire and consolidate knowledge about these technologies, accelerate their implementation in projects and promote the reuse of these solutions in other areas for the purpose of creating synergies within the organization that will benefit the Group. 

The Digital Hub currently works on the following emerging technologies:

• Internet of Things (IoT): use of devices that allow us to measure certain parameters of the environment where they are located, generating data that will enrich the company’s knowledge and allow immediate triggering of automatic actions.
• Drones: use of aerial vehicles that, by means of onboard systems, allow for acquisition of a large amount of information (images, videos, data) in environments that are difficult to access or that entail high risk without compromising the safety of the operator.
• Robotics: systems that autonomously imitate human abilities in their various areas of work: social, collaborative and industrial.
• 3D Printing: facilitates the creation of certain prototypes and pieces of the same utility as others manufactured in a traditional fashion, in less time and/or at lower cost.

A global vision allows us to observe the interrelatedness of these emerging technologies and others, such as data analysis and artificial intelligence.

Therefore, IoT solutions, robotics or self-driving vehicles, for example, are not only responsible for generating various data, the analysis of which drives the optimization of processes, but they are also the physical medium on which complex analytic and artificial intelligence processes are increasingly being performed. These processes are drastically changing the way that we interact with the objects and infrastructures around us.