The Future of Digital Transformation: IoT and AI Emerge as the Leading Formative Forces

Today, at the apex of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) poise to drive business transformation on a macro level. Identifying data as a key ingredient for growth, both technologies help businesses make informed decisions faster and pursue outcome-led innovation with confidence. 

At present, IoT and Artificial Intelligence no longer qualify as trends. Instead, they have become the digital heartbeat and continue to grow at a steady rate. While IoT has scaled beyond simple device connectivity to bring ‘Internet of Everything’ into existence, AI is forging new advances towards replicating human ingenuity. Their true economic impact is reflected in an enterprise’s capability to sense and react to market shifts over time. 

IoT Adoption is More Paramount than Ever

The mid-2000s was the cradle of technological evolution and brought a flood of heterogeneous systems into an enterprise network. By 2009, as the BYOD culture picked popularity, more and more personal devices came into existence. This created the problem of ‘shadow IT,’ systems and applications were tied to organizations, however, not explicitly. Although they were useful for individual lines of business, the stress of managing and securing these systems was excruciating. Moreover, this rampant accumulation of devices strained IT support capacity, which resulted in performance downtimes. 

IoT solved the challenges of fragmented IT and enabled machine-to-machine and asset-to-asset real-time connectivity without human intervention. Data from sensors are moved to the Cloud or the Edge and analyzed for actionable insights. So far, the arc of IoT leans towards building efficiency and enabling agile planning. 

Recently, a new trend, Digital Twin, has gathered pace. A digital twin is a virtual replica of a physical asset, process, or whole system, built using data generated by sensors in real-time. This digital duplicate makes it almost seamless for enterprises to understand, analyze, and optimize concepts in any given physical ecosystem. According to a report, the Digital Twin market is set to explode at a CAGR of 37.87% by 2023, and the valuation is expected to grow from $1.8 billion in 2016 to $15.56 billion in 2023. These numbers indicate that more enterprises are aggressively moving to embrace digital twins in an endeavor to enable better business outcomes. 

AI Growth Market on Steroids

AI’s growth isn’t slowing down either. A range of possibilities across business verticals is redefining the way humans and machines collaborate. Algorithms are becoming more sophisticated, machines are exhibiting human-like intelligence, and data is inspiring AI innovation. The future looks bright, but at the same time, the perils of AI technology threatening our livelihoods can’t be ignored. 

AI has the power to fulfill the promise of amplifying human potential. By providing the tools and approaches necessary for automation, the technology relieves workers of repetitive tasks and helps them focus on other growth-oriented activities. 

Against this promising consensus on AI, there is a lot of disagreement. The technology has stoked fears of jobs displacements in human workers, leaving them on tenterhooks. At the same time, there are many security or privacy concerns related to AI. Nearly 64% of employees have agreed that their leaders aren’t willing to invest in AI because that might expose their security. Another reason why business leaders don’t consider AI a sure bet is its autonomous nature, meaning it can act independently without a human hand. 

Blending Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence to Energize Business Cores

Trends indicate that the juggernauts of IoT and AI will work in tandem to drive disruption. Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 80% of enterprise IoT systems will include an AI component, which is a significant increase from the 10% today. However, the point to ponder is why IoT and AI are considered two sides of the same coin, and how enterprises can seek to monetize them together.

IoT adds connectivity to the objects around us via sensors and generates troves of data that enterprises use for boosting performance and customer experience. However, this data isn’t used immediately after it is generated. Instead, it’s leveraged for insights using AI. Simply put, AI helps in analysis and decision-making based on data collected by IoT sensors and devices. Even the unique datasets on which AI models are trained are built by tapping into the digital foundation of IoT. It isn’t wrong to say that combining IoT with AI will be the next mainstay for enterprises seeking to make smarter decisions and improve operational efficiencies by up to 20%.

Kellton Tech, a global Digital Transformation Company, exhibits an unwavering commitment to IoT and AI innovation. We are driven by a mission that revolves around helping enterprises embrace and scale IoT + AI capabilities by investing in people and steering a technological evolution we have come to envision. We have built an IoT-enabled Smart Energy management solution for a leading energy utility company. This solution also integrated an AI-enabled app to help users predict weather changes in real-time and make arrangements just in time to dodge the energy crisis. The introduction of this widget was a conscious step towards holistically improving customer experience and preventing our client’s renewable energy goals from turning cold.