GE Digital, the IoT and software arm of GE, has acquired a pair of artificial intelligence startups as it continues to push the capabilities of Predix, its Internet of Things (IoT) platform.

The acquisitions of Bit Stew Systems and Wise.io were announced today in San Francisco at Minds + Machines, a GE conference that, in part, focuses on the software aspect of industrial IoT.

Bit Stew uses machine learning to automate data modeling, and it already has an industrial presence with customers such as Pacific Gas & Electric. GE describes Bit Stew as being useful for processing data in real time, a trait that could apply to IoT systems where sensors are continually feeding data into an application.

In a similar vein, Wise.io applies machine learning to large sets of data. It's been tied to big data, but applications for the company's algorithms include customer support, where Wise.io has developed a tool for interpreting customers' questions to speed up resolution times.

GE Digital now has a total of three acquisitions for the week. Yesterday, the company announced a deal to acquire ServiceMax, which creates computer models for logistics and workforce optimization. In other words, ServiceMax helps juggle the people and equipment needed for keeping machines up and running.

That might not sound very "digital," but GE has been using ServiceMax internally, and GE Digital plans to infuse ServiceMax's models with analytics.

ServiceMax is being acquired for $915 million, a deal that GE Digital expects to close in January. The prices of the other acquisitions were not disclosed.

GE is dead serious about becoming more of a software company, and Predix is one of its prime motivators. Predix wears many hats; it's a DevOps environment for building applications, and it's also a place to host analytics engines or to manage security. The plan is to hand all these capabilities to developers and see what use cases they can devise.

The emphasis on Predix, and the advent of GE Digital's conference this week, mean the software hits keep coming. Yesteday, GE launched a program to try to attract ISVs to Predix.

And today, parent company GE announced the hiring of executives out of Google and Microsoft. Patrick Franklin, Google's former vice president of engineering, is now GE Digital's vice president of applications. And Steven Martin, who was chief data scientist at Microsoft Azure, is now chief digital officer of GE Energy Connections.

Photo by Math, via Pexels.