IoT Industry projected to have economic impact of $11 trillion by 2025

The emerging ecosystem of IoT provides reveals how assets are performing At the 2018 AT&T Business Summit, Larry Wash spoke with TechRepublic about how emerging technologies will allow businesses to see what assets are operating either effectively, or insufficiently.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become massively popular as they get cheaper and cheaper, with estimates showing that by 2025, as many as 75 billion IoT devices could be in consumer hands worldwide.
 
Businesses have followed suit, seeking to use the technology to gain more information about their processes and streamline cumbersome workflows.
 
IoT platform Particle released a study on their work with companies across a variety of industries to show how companies were using IoT devices and what the effects of the technology were on their organizations. According to the report, the IoT industry may eventually have an economic impact of more than $11 trillion by 2025.
 
The report surveyed 800 IoT professionals and found that most were using IoT devices for remote monitoring (78 percent), preventative maintenance (55 percent), and asset tracking (33 percent).
 
“The most successful IoT products are those that deliver recurring, continuous value for you and your customers,” said Zach Supalla CEO and co-founder of Particle, in a press release.
 
“While there are a lot of ways you can create that value, we’ve found that remote monitoring, preventative maintenance, and asset tracking are the primary ways companies make money with IoT,” he added. 
 
SEE: Special report: Cybersecurity in an IoT and mobile world (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
 
Sectors including technology, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, or the energy industry seemed most interested in incorporating the technology into their business, the report found. Each of these industries will make upwards of $1 million in profit from their use of IoT devices in the next year.

One of the biggest takeaways from the survey is the amount of money that will be made off of IoT devices in each sector: The IoT device smart home market is expected to swell to nearly $60 billion.

Most companies are using IoT devices for three things: Remote monitoring, preventative maintenance, and asset tracking.

Almost 80 percent of those surveyed said their companies used IoT devices for remote monitoring. About half said their companies performed maintenance with IoT devices and a third said they had been used for asset tracking.

The study noted that companies were rushing into IoT devices with little regard for all of the most effective ways they could be applied. More than half of all respondents bought IoT devices and software before they had even thought about how they would be used, the report found.

This leads to situations where development teams struggled to fix malfunctioning devices, install software updates, and actually use data from the devices that could be useful to their business.

“As the Internet of Things has developed, the number of IoT devices around the world has increased significantly. The number of IoT devices increases around urban areas, but can still be found in remote areas around the world,” the report stated.

For more, check out TechRepublic’s article on the top six business use cases for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

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