Gartner today highlights the top strategic Internet of Things technology trends that will drive digital business innovation from 2018 through 2023, from AI through data broking.

According to Gartner, 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. CIOs who master innovative IoT trends have the opportunity to lead digital innovation in their business, the analyst firm said.

These are the ten that Gartner thinks will enable new revenue streams and business models, as well as new experiences and relationships:

Artificial Intelligence. Gartner forecasts that 14.2 billion connected things will be in use in 2019, and that the total will reach 25 billion by 2021, producing immense volume of data. “Data is the fuel that powers the IoT and the organisation’s ability to derive meaning from it will define their long term success. AI will be applied to a wide range of IoT information, including video, still images, speech, network traffic activity and sensor data.”
The technology landscape for AI is complex and will remain so through 2023, with many IT vendors investing heavily in AI, variants of AI coexisting, and new AI-based tolls and services emerging. Despite this complexity, it will be possible to achieve good results with AI in a wide range of IoT situations. As a result, CIOs must build an organisation with the tools and skills to exploit AI in their IoT strategy.

Social, Legal and Ethical IoT. As the IoT matures and becomes more widely deployed, a wide range of social, legal and ethical issues will grow in importance. These include ownership of data and the deductions made from it; algorithmic bias; privacy; and compliance with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation.

Infonomics and Data Broking. Last year’s Gartner survey of IoT projects showed 35 per cent of respondents were selling or planning to sell data collected by their products and services. The theory of infonomics takes this monetisation of data further by seeing it as a strategic business asset to be recorded in the company accounts. By 2023, the buying and selling of IoT data will become an essential part of many IoT systems. CIOs must educate their organisations on the risks and opportunities related to data broking in order to set the IT policies required in this area and to advise other parts of the organisation.

IoT Governance. As the IoT continues to expand, the need for a governance framework that ensures appropriate behaviour in the creation, storage, use and deletion of information related to IoT projects will become increasingly important. Governance ranges from simple technical tasks such as device audits and firmware updates to more complex issues such as the control of devices and the usage of the information they generate. CIOs must take on the role of educating their organisations on governance issues and in some cases invest in staff and technologies to tackle governance.

Trust and security. Gartner surveys invariably show that security is the most significant area of technical concern for organisations deploying IoT systems. This is because organisations often don’t have control over the source and nature of the software and hardware being utilised in IoT initiatives. By 2023, it expects to see the deployment of hardware and software combinations that together create more trustworthy and secure IoT systems.

Novel IoT user experiences, silicon chip innovation and new wireless networking technologies for IoT are among the others identified.

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