Just how much G.E. has invested in its digital initiatives is uncertain, but it has been several billion dollars. In an article last year in the Harvard Business Review, Mr. Immelt wrote that in 2016 “we put about $4 billion into developing analytics software and machine learning capabilities.”

G.E.’s digital effort dates to 2011, when Mr. Immelt recruited William Ruh, an executive at Cisco Systems. Later that year, the company set up a center in San Ramon, Calif., east of San Francisco. At the time, Mr. Ruh announced big plans to hire as many as 400 software engineers to write code for the industrial internet.

The San Ramon work force swelled sharply to 1,400 in the summer of 2016, and to a peak of 2,000 last summer — before coming down to about 1,800, after a round of cuts earlier this year.

During the buildup, G.E. recruited veteran software managers who had worked at leading tech companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple. With the cuts at GE Digital and its narrowed focus, some of them have departed.

In its early days, the San Ramon center concentrated on writing data analysis and modeling software for applications like predicting when a gas turbine or jet engine would need maintenance, before the machine failed. In 2013, G.E. called that software Predix.

The product plan later broadened to include a cloud-based software platform for handling all kinds of sensor and machine data, and secure communications from the factory floor to data centers. G.E. even built its own data centers.