Recently, my 15-year-old nephew was talking about the Internet of Things and I was pleasantly surprised.  Other than super techies, something that my nephew is not, kids that age are more interested in using stuff rather than thinking about how it works. He was talking about Tesla and then went on to autonomous cars and whether they would work in India given the challenges we face regarding the absolute lack of any rules and certainties on the road.  Of course, no conversation can be complete without Alexa and the ability to turn the lights on and off by shouting for it, how the fridge will order your groceries and that app that turns your AC on and off from the car before you get home. I started wondering how much people think of IoT beyond these usual suspects?  Do they realize how this technology is going to transform, literally, everything? 

Consider this:

• McKinsey suggests that the worldwide number of Internet-of-Things or IoT-connected devices is projected to increase to 43 billion by 2023, an almost threefold increase from 2018. Clearly, IoT is going to be a lot more pervasive than connected cars and connected homes.
•  IoT investments in India were ~USD 5 Billion in 2019 and are expected to triple to touch ~USD 15 Billion by 2021 across both IT and services components – triple in 2 years!
• Data shows that nearly 50% of the 35 major global IoT platform companies have engineering centers in India.[1] Suggesting that IoT is clearly a priority for some of the largest captives set up in India.  That’s staggering.  One could say that global IoT programs are being driven from India.

Where is all this demand coming from?   Before getting into that, let me just define what IoT is so that while you read on, your imagination can help you visualize how all this science fiction will come into play.  The Internet of Things is a reference to a network of physical objects that are connected to the internet that collect and share data between each other or monitor data from the environment.  They also have the ability to transfer data between each other without a computer or human intervention.  Because of the scale and granularity of the data, the insights and actions that can be driven through the analysis of this data, enable an amazing array of automated functionality.

Now let’s go on to a few examples that illustrate why IOT trend line is going to be really steep.  

Making Cities Smarter 

Smart cities are one HUGE opportunity.   Cities are turning smart all over the world and we have our own Smart Cities project in India.  Starting with smart parking meters that help drivers find available parking and paid for by digital payments, we can go on to smart traffic management that analyses traffic flows to optimize traffic lights to limit congestion.  Smart public transport will coordinate services to match commuter needs in real-time.   Smart waste management can use interconnected waste collection points with IoT-powered waste collection trucks for waste removal.  In smart buildings sensors can detect leaks in pipes, a surge of power in electrical circuits and to help improve preventive maintenance leading to saving costs and increasing safety.  (What a Smart City can be )

Creating a Seamless Experience

Another area that is changing literally as I write, is manufacturing.  When machines have sensors embedded in them, there are automatic triggers to the manufacturer when things are a bit ‘off’ in the machine.   The manufacturer gets to know that the machine is not operating properly even before the customer calls.  Just think of the millions and millions of rupees that can be saved when machines are fixed before they go down, fires are averted before something explodes and as an added icing on the cake, through machine learning algorithms, performance is improved for the next cycle by fine tuning things.  There is no capital goods manufacturer today who is not thinking of how to leverage IoT to improve their quality of service and reduce cost of service at the same time.

Streamlining Inventory, Making Production More Efficient

Location tracking is another ubiquitous use of IoT.  Ever seen the video of Amazon’s gargantuan warehouses where robots do all the work of stacking and retrieving (Amazon warehouse)?  All of it enabled by location tracking sensors.  In any factory, managing inventory is a nightmare – it takes time to retrieve what you want.  Enter IoT – tag your machines and tools and you’ll never lose sight of them again.   Production lines begin to work much more efficiently, inventory costs go down since nothing is ‘lost’ anymore.  

Enabling Farming from a Cellphone

Since , we are in India, no conversation on the explosion of IoT can be complete without talking about how it is impacting agriculture.  This conversation starts with smart farming applications such as using sensors to monitor light, humidity and soil conditions to optimise irrigation and fertiliser requirements.  Fertilisers are expensive and water is scarce so anything that improves the efficiency of utilisation makes the farmers job much, much easier.  But then this goes on tracking livestock and using data to always know where they are.  After all, livestock is a farmer’s ‘inventory’.  Health can also be measured by wearables placed on cattle.  For those farmers that can afford greenhouses, a smart greenhouse can drastically reduce the need for labour because IoT enables intelligent monitoring of exactly what is going on inside it.  And best of all, all this information of where the cows are, how much water is needed and whether to increase the temperature in the greenhouse can all be monitored on the farmer’s cellphone.  (IoT for irrigation)

A Brand-new Career-path 

It is this massive opportunity that led to identifying IoT as one of the 10 future technologies that will lead to a whole new category of jobs.  By the time the world gets back to office, many common practices would have shifted to the digital space – smart appliances using a voice command, connected lifts using a smartphone app, etc. IoT is going to be one of the key enablers. With 'contactless’ is gaining importance

 IoT is going to be at the heart of many everyday applications.

Research by Jigsaw Academy has identified three IoT roles that are at the heart of this transformation – architect, engineer and analyst. An IoT architect is like a product manager who assesses the problem and envisions the system, an engineer executes this vision, and an analyst studies the data.  With IoT spanning across every industrial vertical like Retail & Manufacturing, Hospitality, Education, Farming, Healthcare etc., domain expertise is a pre-requisite for anyone in this field.  So, if you really understand your industry and core subject well, it’s time to add a layer of futureproofing on top of it.  Few months into the 21st century, we already know that the technology transformation tsunami is accelerating at an unbelievable pace.  

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors' and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house