Leonardo and the future through
the lens of the digital factory.
Data will be in charge

08 April 2024

An in-depth article published in La Repubblica’s “Affari e Finanza” column reviews the main technological and business directions of Leonardo’s 2024-2028 Industrial Plan. Chief Innovation Officer Simone Ungaro outlines a future in which the technological multi-domain will become increasingly integrated, and digitalisation will progressively bring the fields of action closer together. Land, sea, air, and Space will have increasingly blurred boundaries, since technologies now stretch across all of these areas and communicate with each other. 

“Data will be in charge”: this is how Simone Ungaro, Leonardo’s Chief Innovation Officer, summarises the strategic transformation outlined in the company’s 2024-2028 Industrial Plan to establish itself as a “global security provider”. As Simone Ungaro notes, artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, cloud, and digital twins are equally fundamental to generate data, and technologies will become increasingly data-centric.

This is why, Ungaro explains, the digital continuum is the multipurpose pivot point of the Industrial Plan. It is a common thread of continuity with the past but looking to the future, with a logic of accelerating digitisation and technological convergence. AI, cloud, and digital twins must converge on processes and products to ensure the progression from innovation in the lab to applied innovation, bringing this logic to the entire product portfolio.

In Ungaro’s vision, Leonardo must become a big digital factory in which the digitalisation of all sites and factories activities must also be supported in terms of cybersecurity, one of the strategic areas in the Industrial Plan together with Space.