Dyson engineers are working on a new generation of intelligent, self-improving, connected products. Jake Dyson, Chief Engineer at Dyson, says that the company – in the midst of implementing its £2.75bn investment plan in new technologies – is putting software and connectivity at the center of its future product pipeline. He reveals how leaps in software and connected product capabilities will make customers’ lives easier – fixing issues before the owners of Dyson machines are even aware of a problem. Dyson machines are increasingly clever, using sensors, electronics, control systems and layers of software code. This has been possible thanks to a tenfold growth in software developers since 2012, and Dyson remains committed to growing its team around the world. “Where software and data science take us isn’t about gimmickry or fruitless features – Jake Dyson says –. It’s about bringing purpose and making people’s lives easier – we look after the product without you having to worry. We’ve invested in our laboratories and Campuses in the UK, Singapore, Philippines and Poland for our growing engineering team working on top secret and sustainably smart technologies, with a 15-year outlook”. In the past decade, Dyson has grown the software and connectivity team to more than 10 times its original size in the UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, China and Poland. This growth in expertise reflects Dyson’s focus on advancing the intelligence and “brain” of Dyson machines. This work stretches beyond software; Dyson’s data scientists, robotics, electronics hardware and machine learning engineers, alongside software, work together and make up a significant and growing proportion of the company’s total engineering team – 45% of early career engineers at Dyson work in software-based teams. Software use to be about controlling individual components but now it is critical across every function of Dyson tech. Embedded software, app and cloud development, and layers of onboard software – algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence – on Dyson products enable them to do sophisticated things beyond mechanics, a core area where the business has developed over the past 10 years.
