Artificial intelligence to embed into the fabric of IoT electronics that is managing industrial and personal applications.
2018 will see the AI changing the status-quo in local computing, cyber security and personal voice assistants/speakers. With an introduction of AI-specialized hardware in 2017, the issues with high latency and high bandwidth that are supposed to be restricting the growth of local computing will be resolved. AI-specialized hardware is specialized for a specific task and hence operates with low latency at lower bandwidth, thus saving power through its architecture. 2018 will see the application of such AI-specific hardware to edge devices and enable strengthening the IoT fabric for faster processing and will rejuvenate high responsive –critical applications in automotive, drones and consumer industry, if not industrial as of now.
With the growth of digital operations, manufacturers will have to reside on AI software for mitigating the cyber security risks to protect the assets. In 2018, AI software will be monitoring around 4.2 million network devices and 1.5 million gateways for ensuring wireless, end-point and network security. AI will also be rapidly proliferating in the area of application and cloud security in the same year. Antivirus/malware, firewall, virtualization security, DDoS, intrusion prevention/detection applications will be embedded with AI and data loss protection and IAM applications will increasingly be embedded with AI to mitigate the ever increasing risks of cyber crimes
For personal users, AI powered smart speakers will open up whole new set of experience in 2018. the year will witness the growth of various third party applications for smart speakers. This will enable personal users to perform various tasks that they usually perform using smart phones but using voice-recognition. Consumers will be speaking to the smart speakers to accomplish the online tasks starting from booking a cab to controlling lighting and other electronics in their home.
Internet of thing getting more to the edge and opportunities to open in Retrofit market
Till 2017, IoT is being used for real-time monitoring of the asset and controlling them from the centralized locations, a cloud and on premise control centre. In 2018, we will see fog computing going mainstream. The computing will be pushed down to the edge and the nodes itself will be able to perform computation locally and send the residual action data to the cloud. This would enable distributed computation operation and reduce pressure on IoT networks helping faster processing at lower energy consumption. Major players have already developed specialized hardware and software for fog computing, we will see it coming to the reality in 2018.
2018 will witness the growth of retrofit IoT solutions in the retail market. Several retrofit products to control lighting, consumer electronics, home automation products and can even elevators and other type of functions that are critical to day-to-day life will be available with online and offline channels. Apart from smart homes, now even the normal home will make use of IoT using retrofit solutions and will control the consumer electronics and home automation products with their smartphones or smart speaker/assistants. Developing countries especially will witness the growth of retrofit IoT solutions on account of comparatively lower purchasing power as compared to developed countries.
Most importantly, 2018 will witness narrowing gap between IoT and AI. This will give rise to newer functionalities to the same IoT device, helping to create unique experience for individual user of the same IoT device. IoT applications will start to monitor and take corrective actions as per its user environment with the help of artificial intelligence. This will mark the start of Personal Artificial Intelligence era.
