The Internet of Things remains of the most useful and popular technologies that drive modern innovations. With IoT advancement, businesses are getting incredible advantages in terms of both profitability and value that they bring to the end users.
As Gartner’s research vice president Nick Jones put it, “The IoT will continue to deliver new opportunities for digital business innovation for the next decade, many of which will be enabled by new or improved technologies”. As well, Gartner identified the top-10 biggest IoT trends that we will see in the future. We’ll have a quick look at them and will add a couple more that form the vision of future IoT development across the world.
#1 Further development of Artificial Intelligence
Data is the most valuable asset of any company and it powers the development of AI technology.
Within the next few years, we will see a further rise of AI. This year, about 14 billion connected things are expected to be in use, with the number rising to 25 billion by 2021. That means, companies will continue to find new ways to apply AI to their processes and enhance them.
Right now, AI is massively used in solving numerous tasks but its main skill is the ability to work with Big Data. Since companies rely on the data heavily, AI is priceless when it comes to data collection and analysis. Some of the most popular uses of AI are predictive analytics and virtual assistants that help companies automate their processes.
Based on that, we can predict that in the future AI will take a bigger role in terms of process automation and data analysis and may completely replace some of the professions that are related to work with data.
#2 Social and ethical issues
As said above, AI powers predictive analytics which is used to make decisions such as whether to give credit to a person or not. So if we put it in simple words, AI is the one that decides whether the person is creditworthy or not.
And this is not the only area where AI is the primary decision-maker. As companies rely on it to make decisions, more and more concerns have been rising about biased decision-making, GDPR compliance, etc.
So in the future, those companies that wish to deploy IoT heavily will first have to make sure the process will 100% correspond to the modern ethical, social, and legal standards.
#3 Edge computing
Edge computing has been a buzzword for a while now. If we address Wikipedia, we’ll see the following definition, “Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm which brings computer data storage closer to the location where it is needed”. In simple words, instead of relying on distant cloud storages, companies will probably create their own in order for better information processing.
Here is an example. Say, a company produces autonomous vehicles. Such vehicles need to have an even better reaction than people to avoid accidents and crashes. It takes about 100 milliseconds for the data transmission between the vehicle sensors and the cloud data center. And any delay may lead to horrible results. So it makes sense for the company to work on the development of distributed cellular towers so the computing capabilities get closer to the network edge aka the vehicles.
As for the IoT, Artificial Intelligence helps improve the decision-making process and sensors reaction, thus enhancing the safety of automated vehicles. And this is only one example of successful collaboration between edge computing and the IoT.
#4 Further sensor development
Sensors are the primary points for the data collection, i.e. temperature sensors. So it’s logical that in the future, we will see more varied and advanced sensors to serve more business purposes.
As well, the sensors that we have now will drop down in price so the IoT technology becomes more affordable. For a long time, there has been a stereotype that IoT is the technology that’s affordable for massive industry giants only. However, that’s not true at all and some industry experts believe that soon, IoT will become a must-have for any company that wishes to provide high-quality service.
The development of sensors will also make it possible to obtain more data, thus, making AI models more accurate and powerful.
#5 The merge of infonomics
One more interesting IoT trend according to Gartner is infonomics. That means the information may be managed in the same way as financial assets.
IoT is widely used to collect the data and turn it into valuable insights. So it’s safe to assume that IoT data trading will become widespread in the next couple of years. However, this trend is related to certain concerns, like a data breach, security issues, fraud prevention, and ethics. Companies will have to educate the employees on how to treat the data in the right way to maximize security and receive the most value from infonomics.
One more bit
It all sounds cool and everything but what about the relation of IoT to mobile app development and software development industry as a whole?
Because people have higher standards for products and services, IoT will be able to provide them with such. Mobile virtual assistants are only one example of how IoT can be used in the mobile development industry. The possibilities are endless – it all depends on your creativity and the value for the end users.
