Digital Twins Combine With AI To Help Manage Complex Systems
CIO, Wednesday, June 11th, 2025
Digital twins have historically been used to better understand the workings of computer chips, factory floors, or complex machines like jet engines. But the turbo boost they get when combined with AI gives organizations exponentially more power.
While an engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation in the early 1990s, Karen Panetta co-invented the first digital twin of a CPU.
'When you build computer chips, there are billions of transistors,' she says. 'You can't look at every one with a probe and a wire. Wouldn't it be great if we could have a digital twin model and artificially break it under different conditions, and use that to find manufacturing defects?'