Bernard Marr, an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and strategic business and technology advisor to government and companies, wrote an article for Forbes about five major IoT trends.

IoT (Internet of Things) is becoming increasingly popular in today’s workforce, so it’s important to become familiar with IoT trends. Tools and machinery are becoming increasingly intelligent and connected. According to the article, it is predicted that by the end of 2019 there will be 26 billion connected devices around the world.

5 IoT Trends Everyone Should Know About

Bernard laid out five predictions about how IoT will play out over the next 12 months as people get used to the increasing popularity of IoT.

1. Businesses will get serious about IoT. It is predicted that businesses will lead the surge in IoT adoption in 2019, with roughly 85 percent of companies implementing or planning IoT deployments within the year. Manufacturing is the clear leader when it comes to IoT deployment. Businesses are continuing to see the increasing value in “connected machinery that is capable of reporting every detail of its operating parameters and efficiency to other smart, connected devices.”
2. Devices will become more vocal. “Just as the standard internet gave all of us a voice—the IoT will give everything we own a voice, too,” Bernard explains. Machines with voice control are becoming increasingly popular, and 2019 will be the year that our possessions find their own voice. Voice control is becoming a more common option for industrial and enterprise technology as we move towards a more hands-free work environment.
3. More computing moving to the edge. The “edges” of a network are usually the points where the network touches the real world. A large amount of data collected by these devices, like sensors and cameras, gets wasted. Once these devices are able to carry out their own computation, networks will become less clogged with traffic. This will free up more computing power for important tasks.
4. Artificial Intelligence will increasingly drive IoT development and deployment. IoT and AI are very closely related. The AI within an IoT environment helps train machine learning algorithms to spot outliers within the collected data. This can help highlight any opportunities for efficiency or detect upcoming problems early on. We at Quest have already explored the impact of AI on HR, and combining AI with IoT will only cause greater impact. The article explains that as IoT networks increase in size and complexity, they will become increasingly reliant on new developments in AI and machine learning.
5. 5G networks will broaden the scope and availability of IoT. The first consumer-ready 5G networks will be a big turning point in 2019. They have the potential to operate up to 20 times faster than existing mobile data networks. The speed and availability of data is a core driver of IoT. Faster and more stable networks can help broaden the scope of IoT projects dramatically.