C OVE R STORY
GOING UP Otis Elevator’s products made the leap from human operators to automation decades ago, now it’s ready for its next lift: A.I. capabilities—and being spun out by United Technologies. Judy Marks shares her plan to lead the 166-year-old company into a technology-forged future.
A INTERVIEW BY DAN BIGMAN
bout 2 billion people around the globe touch Otis Elevator’s products each day—from the Empire State Building to the Eiffel Tower to the Burj Khalifa, and hundreds of thousands of mid-rises in between. But few riders ever think about the complicated mechanics hidden in the walls, nor do they fret about being vertically catapulted thousands of feet in mere seconds. They take it for granted that the product will work as it should, which is just how the company’s president, Judy Marks, wants it. “We love that people don’t think that they’re at risk when they use our product,” she said. But don’t mistake reliable for prosaic, because the Internet of Things has opened the door to a whole new way of using the safety elevator invented by Elisha Graves Otis in 1853. For example, A.I. technology will allow passengers to be grouped by destination, thereby increasing speed and capacity by at least 25 percent, and offer them more valuable information along the way. On the maintenance side, predictive analytics will forecast potential issues so that parts can be fixed before breakdowns occur, minimizing out-of-service incidents for customers. The challenge of bringing the lift into a new era is what attracted Marks to helm Otis, which is in the process of being spun out into a $12 billion standalone entity by parent company United Technologies. Every elevator has tons of data on it, says Marks, an electrical
22 / CHIEFEXECUTIVE.NET / MARCH/APRIL 2019
PHOTO BY CELESTE SLOMAN
