The Internet has revolutionized consumers’ lives, say Apple and General Electric, but the business world has yet to enjoy similar benefits. Both companies have stated that they see enterprise as the next frontier. Apple and GE are just starting to focus on this space but both have plans to empower enterprise with tools — with Apple focused on the mobile Internet and GE on sensors and predictive data analysis — that interact with people, track tools and mediate between people and machines.

The New York Times quotes Apple chief executive Tim Cook as saying, “We want to make tools to help people change the world, and that means being in the enterprise.” According to Wired, Cook “asserted that businesses still have only a halting grasp of mobile’s potential.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind the best companies will be the most mobile,” he said. Almost two-thirds of enterprise users rely on iOS devices, and Apple’s agreements with Cisco Systems and IBM are also focused on enterprise, most likely centered on location awareness and personal identification.

GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt says he hopes to generate $10 billion in revenue from this sector by 2020. The company is already engaged in using digital tools for machines, tracking every jet engine throughout its life with the “equivalent of a Facebook page that states where it is and how it’s ‘feeling’.”

The future, say some experts, is the ability of machines to create relationships with their operators. “A camera on every machine will identify who you are,” says GE executive William Ruh, who calls it “effective on-the-job training. It will configure itself optimally for the person using it, or be looking at you and others and figuring out the best practices for its own operation.”

MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson says, “it will be based on billions of objective data points, not crude rules of thumb… [and] personalized to individuals under different conditions and times of day, and it will be more flexible.”

According to Brynjolfsson, benefits not only include increased efficiency but “taking out all the opacity around how things last and behave. “A product that is 30 percent, or even three-tenths of a percent better will get ordered more,” he said.