Iot tech and ai to grow beyond bots and bitcoin
Existing things including IoT devices will become intelligent things delivering the power of AI enabled systems everywhere including the home, office, factory floor, and medical facility. As intelligent things evolve and become more popular, they will shift from a stand-alone to a collaborative model in which intelligent things communicate with one another and act in concert to accomplish tasks. However, nontechnical issues such as liability and privacy, along with the complexity of creating highly specialized assistants, will slow embedded intelligence in some scenarios.
The lines between the digital and physical world continue to blur creating new opportunities for digital businesses. Look for the digital world to be an increasingly detailed reflection of the physical world and the digital world to appear as part of the physical world creating fertile ground for new business models and digitally enabled ecosystems.
Virtual reality VR and augmented reality AR transform the way individuals interact with each other and with software systems creating an immersive environment. For example, VR can be used for training scenarios and remote experiences. AR, which enables a blending of the real and virtual worlds, means businesses can overlay graphics onto real-world objects, such as hidden wires on the image of a wall.
Immersive experiences with AR and VR are reaching tipping points in terms of price and capability but will not replace other interface models.
Over time AR and VR expand beyond visual immersion to include all human senses. Enterprises should look for targeted applications of VR and AR through Within three to five years, billions of things will be represented by digital twins, a dynamic software model of a physical thing or system. Using physics data on how the components of a thing operate and respond to the environment as well as data provided by sensors in the physical world, a digital twin can be used to analyze and simulate real world conditions, responds to changes, improve operations and add value.
Digital twins function as proxies for the combination of skilled individuals e. Their proliferation will require a cultural change, as those who understand the maintenance of real-world things collaborate with data scientists and IT professionals. Digital twins of physical assets combined with digital representations of facilities and environments as well as people, businesses and processes will enable an increasingly detailed digital representation of the real world for simulation, analysis and control.
Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger in which value exchange transactions in bitcoin or other token are sequentially grouped into blocks. Blockchain and distributed-ledger concepts are gaining traction because they hold the promise of transforming industry operating models in industries such as music distribution, identify verification and title registry.
They promise a model to add trust to untrusted environments and reduce business friction by providing transparent access to the information in the chain. While there is a great deal of interest the majority of blockchain initiatives are in alpha or beta phases and significant technology challenges exist. The mesh refers to the dynamic connection of people, processes, things and services supporting intelligent digital ecosystems.
As the mesh evolves, the user experience fundamentally changes and the supporting technology and security architectures and platforms must change as well. The intelligent digital mesh will require changes to the architecture, technology and tools used to develop solutions. The mesh app and service architecture MASA is a multichannel solution architecture that leverages cloud and serverless computing, containers and microservices as well as APIs and events to deliver modular, flexible and dynamic solutions.
Solutions ultimately support multiple users in multiple roles using multiple devices and communicating over multiple networks. However, MASA is a long term architectural shift that requires significant changes to development tooling and best practices. Digital technology platforms are the building blocks for a digital business and are necessary to break into digital. Every organization will have some mix of five digital technology platforms: Information systems, customer experience, analytics and intelligence, the Internet of Things and business ecosystems.
In particular new platforms and services for IoT, AI and conversational systems will be a key focus through Companies should identify how industry platforms will evolve and plan ways to evolve their platforms to meet the challenges of digital business. The evolution of the intelligent digital mesh and digital technology platforms and application architectures means that security has to become fluid and adaptive.
The sheer amount of communications that will have to be handled when IoT devices grow to the tens of billions will increase those costs substantially. Even if the unprecedented economical and engineering challenges are overcome, cloud servers will remain a bottleneck and point of failure that can disrupt the entire network.
This is especially important as more critical tasks such as human health and life will become dependent on IoT. Moreover, the diversity of ownership between devices and their supporting cloud infrastructure makes machine-to-machine M2M communications difficult. A decentralized approach to IoT networking would solve many of the questions above.
Adopting a standardized peer-to-peer communication model to process the hundreds of billions of transactions between devices will significantly reduce the costs associated with installing and maintaining large centralized data centers and will distribute computation and storage needs across the billions of devices that form IoT networks.
This will prevent failure in any single node in a network from bringing the entire network to a halting collapse. However, establishing peer-to-peer communications will present its own set of challenges, chief among them the issue of security. And as we all know, IoT security is much more than just about protecting sensitive data.
The proposed solution will have to maintain privacy and security in huge IoT networks and offer some form of validation and consensus for transactions to prevent spoofing and theft.
Blockchain offers an elegant solution to the peer-to-peer communication platform problem. It is a technology that allows the creation of a distributed digital ledger of transactions that is shared among the nodes of a network instead of being stored on a central server.
Participants are registered with blockchains to be able to record transactions. Transactions are verified and confirmed by other nodes participating in the network, thus eliminating the need for a central authority. Blockchain makes trustless, peer-to-peer messaging possible and has already proven its worth in the world of financial services through cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, providing guaranteed peer-to-peer payment services without the need for third-party brokers.
The concept can directly be ported to IoT networks to deal with the issue of scale, allowing billions of devices to share the same network without the need for additional resources. Blockchain also addresses the issue of conflict of authority between different vendors by providing a standard in which everyone has equal stakes and benefits. This helps unlock M2M communications that were practically impossible under previous models, and allows for the realization of totally new use cases.
The IoT and blockchain combination is already gaining momentum, and is being endorsed by both startups and tech giants. The combination of IoT and blockchain is also creating the possibility of a circular economy and liquefying the capacity of assets, where resources can be shared and reused instead of purchased once and disposed after use.