2024 Industry 4.0 Barometer

Digitalization and Industry 4.0 remain essentiel levers for securing industrial performance.

Mastery of Industry 4.0 solutions continues to advance, with 66% of companies now mature on the subject, an increase of 8% compared to 2023. Paradoxically, while nearly a quarter of respondents report a slowdown in the implementation of Industry 4.0 projects, another quarter finds that the current complex economic environment has, on the contrary, accelerated investments in ROI-focused Industry 4.0 projects.

Given this unfavorable economic context, Industry 4.0 projects are subject to stricter selection than in previous years, favoring initiatives that deliver significant returns on investment.

Concerns and initiatives are shifting towards a greater focus on data management: 77% of respondents consider themselves to be mature when it comes to their data management, an increase of 24% since last year.

The main challenge for industrial companies is to ensure process control using artificial intelligence: 81% of industrial companies have sufficient control over their data to be able to exploit it using AI. However, data exploitation projects using generative AI remain anecdotal: only 1% of the industrials questioned have implemented generative AI in their processes.

CSR issues are being taken more and more actively by industrial companies, 44% of whom have now started to roll out their CSR action plans (up 14% on last year).

This can be seen, on the one hand, in concrete resource management projects, with an 8% increase in the deployment of solutions for monitoring the carbon impact of industries or energy consumption.  Secondly, the integration of the human factor and employee satisfaction are becoming decisive factors in the success of deployment (with 13% of respondents placing employee satisfaction at the heart of I4.0 initiatives).