The First Movers are those companies and industries that embraced automation early on, often starting with widespread deployment of PLCs and other control systems long before digitalization became a buzzword. These organizations have had decades to build up centralized automation departments, accumulate expertise, and develop mature practices for managing and using data to improve operations. For them, working with real-time data, tuning control loops, and integrating systems has become second nature.
Typical examples include the pharmaceutical industry, the broader process industries like chemicals and petrochemicals, and the automotive sector. In these environments, automation is no longer a differentiator: it is simply the baseline. You would never consider building a steam cracker without a DCS, just as you wouldn’t try to run a modern automotive plant without robotics and SCADA. The early push for automation in these sectors was driven by a combination of strict regulation, the need for efficiency, and a relentless focus on safety. In large-scale operations like petrochemical or pharmaceutical plants, even small improvements in efficiency can translate into millions of USD saved. And in tightly regulated environments, automation also supports compliance and traceability.
Because of this long history, these companies tend to have sizable teams dedicated to automation and OT, often housed within their operations and engineering departments. As a result, many of these First Movers are now in a strong position to move beyond automation and into more advanced forms of digitalization, though they face challenges when trying to scale or modernize legacy systems and think outside the box they’ve been working in during all these years. Still, their decades of accumulated experience give them a significant head start.
The Fast Followers are industries where the traditional return on investment for automation was often too low to justify large-scale implementation. In these sectors, full automation simply didn’t make economic sense in the past. As a result, you’ll still find automation in place, but it’s fragmented: limited to individual machines or production cells, each with its own PLC and local controls, but without a holistic, plant-wide control strategy. Sectors like food and beverage manufacturing, as well as manual or semi-automated assembly operations, are typical examples. These environments may lack the fully integrated automation systems of a petrochemical plant (because they often don’t need them), but they’re catching up quickly enabled by more accessible technology and driven by a growing awareness that data, when properly harnessed, can be just as powerful as automation itself.
Unlike the First Movers, these companies typically do not have centralized automation departments. Instead, automation efforts are left to individual plants, local engineering teams or even their vendors/integrators, and priorities vary widely across sites. There is rarely a unified automation roadmap, and strategic decisions about digital tools and technologies are often made case by case. The goal here is not to control an entire facility from a single control room, but to unlock the value of data, both in the boardroom and on the shop floor.
What sets the Fast Followers apart is their growing hunger for insights, combined with ‘virgin ground’ when it comes to shopfloor digitalization. Decision-makers want better visibility into operations, and shop floor teams want tools that make their work easier and more effective. That shift in mindset has been accelerated by the availability of low-cost wireless IIoT sensors, affordable edge devices, and easy-to-deploy cloud platforms. These technologies don’t require a massive upfront investment or deep domain knowledge in industrial control. They’re plug-and-play, often open source or vendor-neutral, and cloud-native by design.
This also explains why IT departments often take the lead in digitalization efforts in these sectors. The tools are familiar, the integration paths are clearer, and the skillsets align more closely with what IT already knows. As a result, Fast Followers tend to see stronger IT ownership in digital transformation compared to First Movers, where OT still dominates the stack.
What does that mean in practice?
The First Movers will start from a strong but complex position. A lot has already been done in the past to improve production, setting the bar higher for digitalization to pay off. Cooperation will also tend to be more politically loaded as you have 2 strong organizations that have to work together. The large install base is also making it hard to adopt new technologies and adopt new ways of thinking (like rethinking the Purdue model in favor of a zero-trust security approach). On the plus side you find much more expertise in production and there is a good chance that the data you need for your projects is already being collected for decades giving you a leg up when it comes to data analysis and AI.
Fast Followers have the opportunity to learn from the experience of the past and skip decades of tradition and expensive equipment. They don’t need to install super expensive gold-plated wiring (or at least that is what it seems to cost). Low cost sensors and cloud technologies make getting data and putting it to use much cheaper and much faster than ever before. IT will also have to take the lead in this transformation and either deal with each plant separately or work through some new manufacturing organization. Either way IT will have to get out of their comfort zone and transform into a technology team instead of the classic ERP/workplace team.