The Internet of Things is a network of digital devices, autonomous vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and connectivity. More companies are turning to IoT solutions and Industrial IoT (IIoT) to realise a host of benefits, including gathering rich data to gain insights, monitoring remote and hard-to-access machines, automating processes, and optimising industry operations.
However, many companies are reaching their bandwidth limits as transmitting massive amounts of data causes delays and poses security risks. Three questions arise: How can latency be minimised? How can high volumes of data be processed and analysed efficiently? And how can IoT security and data protection be ensured? The way out is edge computing, which is decentralised data processing close to the data source instead of remote data centres or the cloud, enabling faster real-time processing and responses.
Almost a third of European organisations using or planning to use IoT already use artificial intelligence (AI) for some functions in their IoT projects (IDC Spotlight report, Nov. 2022). Adding AI to an IoT project can boost its commercial impact significantly. AI elevates IoT projects by shifting them from data collection to data analytics exercises, using rich seams of real-time information to turn insights into action.
