Key facts
The number of developers in the world is growing at about 21 percent each year, and broke the 100 million mark in 2023.¹³ The global market for digital-twin technologies is forecast to grow at about 60 percent annually over the next five years, reaching $73.5 billion by 2027. Some companies report that products starting out as digital twins have 25 percent fewer quality issues when they enter production. Almost 75 percent of companies have already adopted digital-twin technologies that have achieved at least medium levels of complexity.¹⁴
The global market for digital-twin technologies is forecast to reach
$73.5 billion
Implications
Embrace the mindset that treats your firm as a continuous testing ground, and then determine which part of your company you should treat as a digital twin. Instrument everything and simulate everything for better insight, experience, and impact. Advanced software practices incorporate tags to help collect feedback, while the best gen AI developers are those who build testing capabilities into models to accurately measure how they perform in the field. For complex machines that typically use a combination of existing and newly engineered elements, consider creating and managing a library of digital-twin models of key components to test against.
¹³
David Cahn, “The next billion developers,” Sequoia Capital, November 15, 2023.
by 2027.
¹⁴
“Digital twins: The key to smart product development,” McKinsey, July 31, 2023.