It’s that time of year! The moment when all of us in the technology space who are building strategies and plans have to decide where we think the industry is going.  With that in the mind, let the prognosticators prognosticate and the nostradamus’ nostradominate.  Here are ClearBlades Top 7 predictions for IoT in 2023.

Prediction 1 – IoT Cloud Service’s Slow Demise.

Thanks to an event filled 2022 this is a pretty easy one – IoT lived its moment at the top of the hype cycle and all the clouds and software vendors jumped in.  A vision of a simple cloud service that would solve your IoT problems was thrust to the world.  These cloud services have made IoT understandable but also left users wanting so much more.  An IoT service alone wasn’t a solution.  Major capabilities like device management and Edge were somehow not part of the offering.  Pricing calculus was causing nightmares in business models.  Evidently some of these offerings never hit the profitability goals as many services were shut down at the end of 2022.  Whether its vendor abandonment or customer migration this year, IoT Cloud Services begin their slow passing. Will another major vendor shut down or stop support? Undoubtedly.

In its place we see a suite of tools that make IoT Foundation with a true understanding of what people are attempting to build. 

Predictions 2 – Bespoke becomes a bad word.  

All these services have resulted in massive development projects that have cost a lot of money along the way.  Upon deployment many of these projects are expensive to run, and operational costs were never understood upfront.  This year many step back from simple aspirational power points and look to find reuse, simplicity of running, and faster times to market.  Configurable IoT applications, niche IoT solutions, and no-code tools will have new found allure.

Prediction 3 – AI searches for IoT data  

Artificial Intelligence companies and data scientists alike have been making amazing strides where data is plentiful.  Humorously, with so many annual IoT Predictions articles written in the last 10 years, AI does a great job at writing their own. While it’s been a fun ride putting AI into more places, having more of an impact is the next phase of adoption.  This will be done with access to machine information.  This year AI teams will go searching for partnerships and solutions in the IoT space to unlock new understandings.  Together these partners will structure data in new ways and ultimately we will see AI convergence to the physical world.

Prediction 4 –  An operator installs an internet connected sensor in a forest, but no one from IT is around to call it IoT. 

As is typical for enabling technologies after all the Proof of Concepts and pilots are done, the real work gets done by people who aren’t even aware what they are doing has a special name.  This year operational technology (OT) workers will install IoT like solutions like never before to monitor and automate their jobs.  It’s highly likely those diligent workers won’t call it IoT, they won’t call an analyst to write a press release – heck they may not immediately add it to their LinkedIn profile.  IoT will be leveraged more than ever before in usecases by major industries we never hear about.  How will we know this happened? Most likely we will see significant savings in operations costs and improved worker productivity. 

Prediction 5 – Vetting of business models.

In the last 20 years we have learned that many ideas are good, but many ideas are not good for the current moment.  For example, pets.com failed where Chewy thrives today.  We have seen a lot of wild ideas when it comes to IoT the last few years.  With the changing economics we will learn how many of these solutions are going to provide value in this moment.  Whether it’s the bicycles on the streets, smart medical devices, or the refrigerators in our homes, this year will force many companies to decide if the business model behind their IoT solution is going to work.  This is generally healthy for technology, but will be painful to watch unfold.  Hopefully my refrigerator makes it! 

Prediction 6 – Energy has the Power.

With so many business models being vetted, this year we will hear about more and more solutions focused on energy.  Whether its traditional energy generation gaining efficiency, new green energy solutions being built, or legacy energy users finding new energy savings strategies – these are projects that will be pushed forward in 2023.

Prediction 7 – IoT security will fail us again, again, and again – but not because of IoT. 

In some ways it will be more of the same, but new challenges are now appearing for IoT Solutions developers who for the last few years have really started to try to implement good security.  Unfortunately, we are now finding that the tools being depended on to provide security to the overall systems are becoming vulnerable. While companies like LastPass, Okta, and tools like Github and nodejs oAuth tokens don’t sound like things that affect your connected home appliance or factory – it’s extremely likely one of those is used by your IoT providers.  This means while we may have locked all the device front doors, it’s now possible the keys to all the backdoors are simply under the mat.

There they are – 7 predictions in writing, for all time.  Time to see what happens for real!