Pittsburgh TechFest 2026

Connecting machines to the cloud is only the first step toward intelligent manufacturing. This presentation shares the technical journey of redesigning Conair's SmartServices platform to support large-scale industrial monitoring, remote machine control, and future AI-driven insights.
We'll cover the end-to-end architecture—from industrial protocols and Azure IoT Edge through cloud services and real-time dashboards—and discuss the tradeoffs between edge and cloud processing, telemetry retention, and operating costs. Along the way, we'll examine how a unified equipment model enables diverse machine types to be monitored through a common interface.
The session concludes by exploring how the platform enables predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and optimization using AI, along with the practical challenges of training and deploying machine learning models in industrial environments.