Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has opened an IoT engineering laboratory in Ohio to accelerate innovation for its clients.

The Bringing Life to Things Lab in Cincinnati, Ohio, is designed to support the rapid prototyping, experimentation and large-scale implementation of AI, genAI and IoT engineering, enabling TCS to assist clients in bringing innovations to life faster and more efficiently.

Spanning across 280 square metres, this lab aims to advance the deployment of TCS’s IoT suite, including Clever Energy, DMP digital manufacturing platform and Digifleet, among others. These cater to various industries including health care and life sciences, manufacturing, energy and resources, and consumer packaged goods. The lab will also help businesses collaborate and co-innovate, integrating physical assets, partner technologies and customer challenges to create new offerings.

“On the demand side, structural shifts such as energy transition, supply chain relocation and AI are requiring significant new production capacity in the USA that is connected, intelligent and autonomous by design,” said Amit Bajaj, president for North America at TCS. “On the supply side, intelligent edge, powered by advances in connectivity, sensor and AI technology, is reinventing customer experience, personalised products and connected manufacturing. TCS’s investment in the Bringing Life to Things Lab in Ohio will help our clients bridge the traditional divide between operational and digital technology by rapidly turning their ideas into minimum viable products that reimagine their value chain at scale. With its strategic location in Cincinnati, home of TCS’s largest American delivery centre, the lab is well positioned to tap into the area’s tech talent to help our customers across North America.”

Regu Ayyaswamy, global head of IoT and digital engineering at TCS, added: “With the inauguration of the Bringing Life to Things Lab, TCS reaffirms its commitment to driving innovation and digital excellence in an era defined by artificial intelligence and genAI. This lab will spark co-innovation, enabling clients to brainstorm and collaborate through design thinking workshops, and unlock the full potential of IoT, AI and genAI technologies.”

The lab also offers TCS innovations, including neural manufacturing, which provides autonomous and intelligent capabilities for factories, and a connected healthcare platform, providing personalised medicine.

A key initiative anchored at the lab is the digital twin of the heart. TCS announced the creation of the first-ever digital heart of a professional runner in 2023, unveiling a virtual replica of Boston Marathon champion and two-time Olympian Des Linden’s heart. Through this partnership, TCS aims to demonstrate how AI-powered digital-twin technology can transform athlete training by measuring and monitoring the heart’s performance in real time. Beyond athletics, this technology has the potential to transform healthcare. In concert with wearable devices and sensors, it can gather and deploy patient data to perform real-time analyses, preventing the development or progression of medical conditions.

IoT technology is also at the heart of digital transformation in the automotive sector. TCS helps automakers and OEMs navigate and accelerate their journey towards building software-defined vehicles (SDVs). The Auto Gen AI suite at the lab expedites the design, development and validation of SDVs, leveraging genAI and object detection to track people, vehicles and other hazards in a car’s path.

In addition to serving clients, the lab engages with the local community through TCS’s Grow+ smart gardening technology. Over 50 employees collaborated to develop a 320 square metre smart garden, leveraging sensor fusion based IoT technology to monitor plant environments, optimising growth conditions such as watering. Since its inception, TCS has harvested over 1500kg of fruit and vegetables, benefitting more than 500 families through various charitable organisations.

Aligned with TCS’s flagship digital innovation and career readiness programme, GoIT (go innovate together), the lab also serves as a hub for researching, designing and testing emerging learning concepts with experts in the field before taking them into classrooms all over the world. The opening of this lab underscores the presence of TCS (www.tcs.com) in the USA, where it has a 50-year legacy of driving growth and transforming the businesses of companies in every sector.