SmarterCX: Internet of Things (IoT) Predictions for Technologists, Builders, and Creators in 2020
As we forge our way once more unto a new decade, we are bound to come upon many predictions for the year and those to come. Some will be bold, some hedging, some will be proven, others disproven, and many – read: most – will be forgotten to all but the eternal recollection of elephants and the deep archives of the Wayback Machine.
Now, here at Pareteum, we’ve been keeping tabs on trends and predictions for the converging universes of mobile connectivity, the Internet of Things (IoT), and wireless technology. The folks over at SmarterCX.com, a website established by Oracle for professionals tasked with building the next generation of customer experience, published three trends they’re monitoring in the IoT world.
The article, penned by Ritika Puri and titled “Under the Radar IoT Predictions for Technologists, Builders, and Creators in 2020,” observes that market demand in the IoT industry has generally outpaced innovation. Still, citing a forecast from Accenture, Puri notes that the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), alone, has the potential to add as much as $14.2 trillion to the global economy.
Puri believes, moreover, that such projections reveal the vast opportunity IoT presents entrepreneurs, corporations, and governments alike. A sentiment we here at Pareteum share. Indeed, the Pareteum Experience Cloud is already functioning in numerous IoT deployments – most notably the city of Kyiv’s Smart City project.
Puri anticipates the development of many meaningful, profitable, and impactful IoT products in 2020. For those of us tasked with doing the heavy lifting, she points to the following trends:
- The time to “think big” is now
Quoting Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, Ritika Puri notes that via IoT, the world now has the potential to connect billions more people to digital networks, dramatically improve the efficiency of organizations, and even manage assets in ways that can help regenerate the natural environment.
Indeed, wherever market demand has outpaced innovation, innovation must soon follow. As Puri notes, citing the World Economic Forum, we are on the precipice of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. The time to think big, in other words, is now.
“It may be hard to see when you’re in the trenches, but as a technologist, your decisions have the potential to build the future of the world,” writes Puri, “Companies like Arable Labs are doing exactly that. By inventing a simple crop monitoring sensor, Arable has helped the global agriculture industry create new pathways to preventing crop failures on a global scale.”
- Social issues will orient growth
As the example of Arable Labs shows, with IoT, even the simplest solutions can affect global prosperity.
Puri writes: “The Internet of Things has the potential to impact every major commercial sector—something as simple as a sensor has the potential to improve outcomes in medicine, improve safety in manufacturing, and increase efficiencies for harvesting solar energy.”
She also notes that Gartner predicts innovations in IoT will happen in-tandem with the development of governance and regulatory frameworks in 2020 and beyond.
“Gartner noted that as the IoT grows, governance frameworks will likely emerge to establish and enforce rules around the creation, storage, use, and deletion of information around IoT implementations,” writes Frederic Paul for IDG’s Network World. “Those rules could range from regulating technical issues such as device audits and firmware updates to deeply complex questions around who controls IoT devices and the data they generate.
- People > technology
Finally, as Puri sees it, the most powerful force driving IoT innovation is people. Citing research from Cisco, she remarks that the average number of devices and connections per person in North America is expected to rise from 8 in 2017 to 13.6 in 2022. As the number of connected devices people interact with in their everyday lives increases, so too will the expectation that they become more sophisticated.
Yet, as Network World’s Fredric Paul, puts it, even though the conventions for human-IoT interactions are still being established, “it’s still too soon to know exactly what kinds of IoT user experience metaphors will gain traction and which will fall by the wayside.”
“Technologists who build Internet of Things-related products are wise to remember that they’re setting the standard for what the future will become,” writes Puri, “and human needs will always take priority.”
