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Welcome to another episode of the IT/OT Insider Podcast!
We sat down to talk about i3X with John Dyck, CEO, and Jonathan Wise, Chief Technology Architect at CESMII. CESMII is a US not-for-profit consortium, federally funded by the Department of Energy, with a clear mission: make smart manufacturing accessible for all manufacturers, not just the ones with deep pockets and dedicated engineering teams.
Fifty projects. One persistent frustration.
Before CESMII built anything, they watched. Jonathan’s team ran or supported roughly fifty smart manufacturing projects with US manufacturers — small facilities getting their first sensors connected, large enterprises with decades of automation behind them. Across all of them, the same pattern appeared: interoperability was never designed in.
Not because anyone was careless. The mindset across much of the industry — especially in the US, as Jonathan puts it — is to find the problem in front of you, fix it, and move on. The result is what he describes as a patchwork quilt: software layers brought in at different times to solve different problems, never built to work together, often arriving through acquisition. You end up with deeply heterogeneous architectures where nobody — and no system — has a shared understanding of the data.
Out of those fifty projects, CESMII extracted valuable lessons. Jonathan’s team identified three things that had to be true for manufacturing data to be genuinely usable across systems. They called them the Smart Manufacturing Imperatives. The first two set the foundation. The third is where i3X comes in.
The 3 Smart Manufacturing Imperatives
The first imperative is about information modelling. Before data can travel, it needs to mean something. CESMII calls this Information Model Standardisation — an open, standards-based approach to describing manufacturing devices, assets and processes consistently. They’ve built this out through their Smart Manufacturing Profiles: a library of reusable, community-maintained models that give manufacturers a head start rather than asking everyone to start from scratch.
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The second imperative is about the platform layer that sits on top of those models. A Contextual Manufacturing Information Platform — a clear set of requirements for what any serious industrial data platform needs to support in order to enable application interoperability. If that sounds familiar, it should: it maps closely to what we’ve described in our own Industrial Data Platform Capability Map. The capabilities required are broadly the same. The language is different, but the thinking converges.
The third imperative is having an open and common API to get to all data in context. Even with shared models and capable platforms, applications still can’t talk to each other if every vendor exposes their data through a different API. i3X — the Industrial Information Interoperability eXchange — is CESMII’s answer to that: an open, common API for manufacturing systems that enables rapid application development, AI deployments, Edge AI, and supply chain integration. We’d go further and say it might also be the answer to something we’ve been asking since we published our Capability Map: what does Capability 7, Data Sharing, actually look like in practice?
What i3X is
i3X is a vendor-agnostic, open API specification that any manufacturing information platform can implement, regardless of what’s running underneath. It is not a platform. It doesn’t tell you how to build your system. It defines the surface your system needs to expose: typed data, live and historical access through a consistent structure, hierarchical organisation that can expand into a full graph of relationships.
Explore CESMII’s interactive visualization here: https://i3x.dev/viz/
Explore the API endpoints and try them out yourself via https://api.i3x.dev/v1/docs
To make all of this even more accessible, CESMII released i3X Explorer: a free test client that lets you load your implementation and see exactly which functions are covered and which aren’t. Whether you’re a developer building a platform or an engineer specifying a project, it gives you a concrete view of where you stand.
At the ProveIT event in Dallas, six vendors demonstrated live interoperability against i3X on the same stage, (Aron Semle from HighByte who joined us on the podcast a few weeks ago is one of them). Take a look at the full recording here:
Why it matters beyond the API.
The bigger picture, as John frames it, is democratisation. If the API is common, a developer or an AI model built against i3X works across any compliant platform. That changes the economics entirely — especially for small and medium manufacturers who can’t afford to rebuild integrations for every environment they deploy into. It also opens up genuine innovation: build once, run anywhere, learn fast, iterate.
For manufacturers, the practical message is simple. Start asking your vendors whether they support i3X. If they don’t, ask why. The vendor community has shown it’s willing to move when customers ask for it.
The big question for the coming years now becomes: Will this one stick? So…. to be continued 🙂
Extra Resources
* i3X specification: https://www.i3x.dev
* i3X on GitHub: https://github.com/cesmii/i3X
* Our HighByte episode with Aron Semle: https://itotinsider.substack.com/p/aron-semle-on-mcp-agents-and-the
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