Introducing IOI, the Internet of Industrials

In The Physical Economy Has No Index, I argued that the physical economy needs a neutral, live index of what capacity exists, where it is, what it costs and what is moving through it. Today I want to introduce the system we are building to make that index possible. We call it IOI, the Internet of Industrials.

Two worlds that cannot talk

The physical economy runs on two very different sets of systems.

The first is the legacy surface that most of industry still runs on. ERPs such as SAP ECC and Oracle EBS. EDI over a value-added network, where a load tender is an X12 204, a status update is a 214 and an acceptance is a 990. Mainframes and AS400 green screens running COBOL jobs. Flat files dropped over SFTP every night. Bills of lading, rate confirmations and invoices sent as PDFs by email. Spreadsheets on a shared drive. And whatever custom stack each company built in house over the past thirty years.

The second is the new physical layer. Telematics that report a vehicle's position, hours and empty space. Self-driving trucks that can take a load and route themselves. Automated factories with lines, docks and throughput that software can schedule. Robots that pick, move and load on the floor.

These two worlds do not share a language. A self-driving truck has no way to read an EDI 204 from an AS400. An automated factory cannot answer a rate confirmation that arrives as a PDF. So people translate between them, the same way they have translated between legacy systems for decades, and the autonomous machines end up waiting on email.

IOI is the layer in the middle.

Integrated coordination for every company

A few companies have already solved this problem for themselves. The largest vertically integrated operators built their own coordination layers, where factories, warehouses, fleets, robots and planning systems share one internal model of the operation. A robot, a truck and a production plan can act on the same information in real time. That capability is a large part of how those companies move as fast as they do.

It also took them years and enormous engineering teams to build, and it only works inside their own walls. A mid-sized manufacturer, a regional carrier or a distributor running on an AS400 has no realistic way to build the same thing.

IOI makes that capability open and easy to set up. Connecting a node works much like adding a carrier, with no multi-year integration project, and every company that connects can coordinate with the others through the same open schema. The coordination advantage that used to require owning the whole stack becomes available to the entire market.

The node and the data lake

Each company runs its own IOI node. The node connects to the systems the company already has, on both sides, and nothing gets ripped out. Inside the node is the company's IOI data lake: a cleaned, queryable set of its industrial data, IOI-compatible and built on an open-source schema.

A default setup takes days. Every node starts as a monitoring surface for the company's freight quotes, and IOI optimizes physical operations from the secured data lake from there. ERP, EDI and every other surface are optional, and can be added at any time afterwards.

As a node grows, it follows three steps:

1. Connect. The node starts with freight quotes, then links to whichever legacy surfaces and physical assets the company chooses to add, along with suppliers, carriers and customers who choose to connect.
2. Clean. It normalizes what arrives, whether that is an EDI message, a nightly CSV, a PDF bill of lading or a telemetry stream, into the IOI schema, and keeps the data lake current as the operation moves.
3. Act. People, software and AI agents read and act on the data lake through IOI Search, the API and MCP.

tender {
  load:     "SH77412",
  origin:   "Coppell, TX",
  dest:     "Laredo, TX",
  pallets:  9,
  weight:   7850,
  pickup:   "Thu 08:00"
}

A schema for reading and for acting

IOI's schema covers taking action as well as reading state, between companies and between machines. A few examples of what it covers:

Because every connected company speaks the same schema, these operations work across company lines. A manufacturer's planning agent can check a supplier's capacity, ask its plant to produce, book a truck with open space heading that way and track the result, without anyone re-keying an EDI message or forwarding a PDF. A self-driving truck can claim a tender that originated on an AS400. The legacy system keeps running exactly as it does today. It simply gains a counterpart that can act on what it says.

The schema is open source because a common language only works if anyone can speak it. Fleets, factories, robot makers and software companies can build to it directly, and every company that connects makes the network more useful for every other.

Private by design

The node and its data lake belong to the company that runs them. Its data is never pooled with another customer's. Connecting a partner, an agent or a machine takes the owner's explicit permission. Every grant has a defined scope, every grant can be narrowed or revoked at any time, and every access is logged. AI agents get one of three scopes: read, propose or act.

We learned the importance of this in freight. Carriers will not share where their open space is if it helps a competitor undercut them, and shippers will not share their volumes if they end up in someone else's rate sheet. An index only works when the people feeding it trust it. What becomes shared knowledge is the aggregate shape of the economy. Every individual position stays private.

What runs on IOI

IOI is the foundation for everything Oway builds:

• Oway OS uses it to optimize revenue, facility throughput, assets and suppliers, and to move goods on capacity already in motion.
• IOI Search lets anyone ask the operation a question in plain English and get the answer with the numbers and sources behind it.
• Juno, our industrial AI, reads the data lake and quotes, books, schedules, routes and dispatches work within the permissions a company sets.
• AI agents and machines read state and propose or take actions through MCP, under the same rules as everyone else.

Freight was the first surface because the data already existed, thanks to the ELD rule, and the waste was easy to measure. IOI is how the same approach reaches production, warehousing, robotics, energy and every operation that makes and moves things.

Over the next few notes we will open up an IOI node, show what IOI Search can answer, and explain how we let AI act in the physical world safely. To see it on your own operation, request a demo or read the docs.