At QiO, we enjoy hearing from our team of industry experts about how they use their industry background and expertise to approach today’s industrial problems. One such expert is our Chief Technology Officer, Gary Chandler.
Gary Chandler has spent the last five years at QiO delivering Internet of Things technologies to large industrials to help them generate value and realize their digital roadmap. Gary has over 30 years of experience in engineering real-time embedded software control systems for safety-critical applications, predominantly aerospace. Gary spent 25 of those years at Rolls Royce, where he served as Chief Engineer for engine control systems and later as Chief Data Architect and Head of Software for the firm.
Gary Chandler has spent the last five years at QiO Technologies delivering Internet of Things technologies to large industrials to help them generate value and realize their digital roadmap. Gary has over 30 years of experience in engineering real-time embedded software control systems for safety-critical applications, predominantly aerospace. Gary spent 25 of those years at Rolls Royce, where he served as Chief Engineer for engine control systems and later as Chief Data Architect and Head of Software for the firm.
Gary recently sat down with Ken Forster, executive director at Momenta and host of their podcast, Digital Thread. Listen to the full podcast episode here or keep reading for some of our favourite insights from Gary.
From Silicon Glen to QiO: Gary’s Journey
Gary comes from an area on the west coast of Scotland, which was known as Silicon Glen, the high-tech industry hub in Scotland. Some of his family members worked at IBM, so from an early age, he was surrounded by developments in digital electronics. Growing up, he was always trying to connect electronics to the IO ports on the early personal computers and create some interaction with the real world. He obtained an electronics degree in ’91. However, he realized early on that he didn’t want to design IT systems or office software; instead, he wanted to work with control systems and was more interested in robotics and automation rather than PCs themselves. After graduation, his first job was working on engine control systems for Rolls Royce jet engines, a mission-critical application that he continued to do for the next 25 years before joining QiO.
While working at Rolls Royce, Gary worked with their famous Power-by-the-Hour business model, which is ubiquitous in the industry today. In this model, the product’s end-user doesn’t ever buy or ever own the product. Instead, they buy the results of using the product by the hour. This is also known as servitization.
To maintain long-term success and profitability with the Power-by-the-Hour model, companies need really robust data to help them set the right price for their services. This depends on a lot of factors, such as being able to predict how each asset will be used, how long it will remain operational, what maintenance it will need, how much the maintenance will cost, and more. This requires a state-of-the-art data center.
“Right from my very first experience with “Power by The Hour,” I was quite inspired by it,” says Gary. “To this day, I still believe servitization is the most eco-friendly business model I’ve seen. If you can reduce the uncertainty using data, you can start to understand incentives across the end-to-end supply chain and make it a win-win for all.”
Around 2013, big data was undergoing a rapid change. Gary took on the Chief Data Architect role to align the data chain across different groups and exploit the rapid developments in IoT technology.
“When I saw the potential of the IoT technologies to transform the day-to-day operations, I was hooked—connected equipment, processing power, compute costs, access to huge data sets,” said Gary. “Suddenly, they all seemed as though they were in touching distance.”
Excited by his new role in software, Gary looked around and made the decision to join QiO Technologies and jump headfirst into the IoT world.
“I was concerned that access to the power of AI in industrials might get locked into a privileged few,” said Gary. “I wanted to try and demystify AI and make it more accessible to industrials who couldn’t necessarily afford to employ the sort of dedicated analytics teams that we had at Rolls Royce.”
Demystifying AI for Industrials
QiO’s mission is to make AI more accessible to industrials and provide key insights to everyone who could benefit from them.
QiO delivers an AI-augmented foresight suite of solutions to accelerate digital transformation, revenue growth, and sustainability for the global industrial sector. QiO solutions essentially act as a coach and a mentor to our clients to make them operate at their best every day. Industrial operations have good days and bad days, but sometimes analyses need to run a few days or weeks before “good” and “bad” can be defined.
The goal is to accelerate digital transformation and help industrials make better decisions faster. We do this by using AI to recommend the best changes and interventions that operators need to make in real-time to keep their systems optimized for energy efficiency and to be the best version of themselves that they can be. Instead of having operators waste valuable time considering multiple outcomes, our AI models recommend the best outcome for them with a clear “do this now” directive.
“I see a lot of great IoT companies out there working at the data and the information layers,” says Gary. “My passion is to use AI to go deeper and generate wisdom from a customer’s data and make this more available to everyone and help accelerate that digital growth, helping companies achieve their sustainability goals and save money. That’s our mission.”
Hear more from Gary
If you’re interested in hearing more insights from Gary about his background and vision for the future of AI and industrials, you can listen to the full podcast interview here. You can also learn more about Gary and the rest of our leadership team on our website.