The utilization gap: your plants use less than 8% of the data they already collect

Industrial operators collect enormous volumes of sensor and operations data. Recent work in the sector puts the share actually used in operating decisions at under 8%. The other 92% is captured, stored, and never turned into a decision.

That reframes the problem. The scarce input is not more instrumentation or more compute — it is the ability to route data you already hold into the decisions that matter: margin, safety, uptime. Because the marginal cost of exploiting an already-owned dataset is close to zero, the return on the first project is a decision that should take hours to reach, not a multi-week business case.

The method is the same map we apply everywhere: the data you already possess, crossed with the decisions that move the plant. Root-cause investigations that took days collapse to minutes when time-series, engineering documents and physics are integrated in real time.

Before the first line of model code, the question for an operator is simple: which decisions are you making slowly today because the data sits unused — and what would it be worth to make them in seconds?