7 top IoT trends to watch in 2025 and beyond

Reviewing 2024 IoT challenges and advances

International movements in Asia, North America and Europe are enabling more local semiconductor supply chains. Developing shorter supply chains can help avoid shortages such as those experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and create a more diverse and global semiconductor industry. These new chip manufacturing facilities will start to come online within the next couple of years. Creating shorter supply chains for semiconductors should help avoid future issues with the chips needed to develop IoT applications.

Inventory excesses due to supply chain uncertainty were used up by the end of 2023 with increased demand and prices for semiconductor devices through much of 2024. But unless there are significant economic issues in 2025, demand and supply for semiconductors should be more balanced than in 2022 and 2023. AI applications in the data center and industrial and consumer devices will increase demand for semiconductors in 2025.

However, 91% of respondents to the IEEE survey believed that 2025 will bring about a GenAI reckoning as public fascination and perception shift and expectations become clear on what the technology can and should do regarding, for example, accuracy of results and transparency around deepfakes. Most respondents plan to embrace GenAI, but it looks like AI will not be implemented on a mass scale in 2025.

This hesitancy could impact AI usage in creating models that ingest data collected from IoT devices and applying these models in applications on IoT devices. Once created in data centers, these models can be implemented as an inference engine at the network edge or in IoT endpoint devices to enable new and better performing applications. Some of these models can also learn locally, adjusting their capabilities as they gain experience with data in the field.

IoT drivers in 2025 and beyond

AI, new chip designs, widespread connectivity, data center disaggregation and price stabilization are among the major factors that will contribute to IoT's growth.

1. More AI support for IoT

The top four potential applications of AI in 2025, according to the IEEE survey, are the following:

• Real-time cybersecurity vulnerability identification and attack prevention.
• Powering educational activities such as customizing learning, intelligent tutoring systems and university chatbots.
• Aiding and accelerating software development.
• Increasing supply chain and warehouse automation efficiencies.

Increasing supply chain and warehouse efficiencies will require significant investments in IoT technology to enable product identification, handling and development. Industrial IoT could also play an important role in increasing sustainability and a circular economy in supply chains.

IoT-capable factories can combine greater monitoring and local intelligence with robotics and automation to handle many operations and tasks. Given the intelligence of IoT-based systems, humans are increasingly filling roles that require their unique capabilities in making decisions using objective and subjective criteria with machine intelligence to create safer and more efficient factories and supply chains. AI and AI-based IoT devices can also enable predictive maintenance in factories to increase production.

For consumer and some industrial IoT applications, using AI to promote privacy will be important, as will higher local connectivity, such as 5G and long range wireless communications for remote applications. IoT devices that collect medically useful information that can help improve healthcare will particularly need greater security protection. Advanced capabilities, such as using AI to create digital twins of systems and perhaps even of humans, like digital cognitive twins to aid in education, could also be used in future advanced IoT applications, as might direct brain-to-machine interfaces.

2. More widespread connectivity of IoT devices

The number of connected IoT devices is estimated to surpass 40 billion by 2030, according to a "State of IoT Summer 2024" report by market researcher IoT Analytics. This project growth will be aided by the increased replacement of 2G/3G wireless networks with 4G/5G networks. While connectivity will increase in urban communities, many rural areas will still depend on lower-performing networks. This disparity in available communication bandwidth will widen the digital divide between wealthy urban areas and poorer rural areas. Satellite communications networks could help bridge the gap, but they're limited in bandwidth and might be expensive.

3. Lower costs for IoT product components

Prices for important IoT components such as memory and storage should mostly stabilize and perhaps lower in 2025 compared to much of 2024, when the supply chain had to adjust to suddenly increasing demand after almost two years of product surpluses following the pandemic. Stable or lower prices plus more availability of components in 2025 will also result in lower costs for endpoint IoT products, which could accelerate further adoption.

4. New technological developments

IoT is attracting many new technological developments that will drive growth in 2025 and beyond. These developments include changes in computer architectures -- partly driven by changes in storage and memory approaches -- that will affect the way data is stored and processed in data centers and at the network edge, resulting in less data movement and lower-power data processing. In addition, new chiplet packaging technology will enable denser and more specialized chip-based systems, including the network edge and endpoint IoT devices. There's also a move to switch some volatile memory to non-volatile memory, so IoT endpoint devices with more memory can hold and process data with lower power requirements. Fundamental changes in computer processing could enable more IoT applications in the future.

5. System disaggregation enabling more efficient data processing

Disaggregation of traditional data center servers and composing virtual computing systems will enable more efficient processing of data, lower power consumption and more sustainable computing. Much of the data processed in data centers is due to IoT applications, and as IoT grows, this processing will grow. Non-volatile memory express (NVMe), Compute Express Link (CXL) and the changes these standards enable in computer architecture will reduce online costs for many IoT applications.

6. New chip design and standards

Traditional semiconductor device design is also undergoing its own disaggregation with the introduction of chiplets. Chiplets separate many of the traditional CPU functions into smaller chips that are connected to each other with high-speed interconnects on a small package. GPUs made by many leading chip manufacturers use chiplet architectures. In 2022, a standard called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) was introduced to enable specialized chips from many manufacturers to be combined in a compact package. This new design enables the creation of more specialized semiconductor chiplet packages for special applications and creates the need for a new type of foundry for assembling chiplets into a UCIe package. UCIe will enable more efficient semiconductor devices for data centers, the network edge and IoT endpoint devices.

7. Emerging non-volatile or persistent memory technologies for IoT

Lower prices on DRAM, NAND flash and other important semiconductors for IoT devices and the increasing density of these memory devices will help lower the costs and increase the capability of IoT devices. In addition to these traditional memory technologies, there are emerging non-volatile or persistent memory technologies in many IoT devices, particularly for code storage in designs under 28 nm. Magnetic RAM (MRAM) and resistive RAM (RRAM), for example, are used in some consumer IoT devices such as wearables. Replacing static RAM with a non-volatile memory such as MRAM enables more lower-power states when the IoT device is not actively used. For energy-constrained applications, like those running on batteries, this approach increases the usefulness and life of a charge for the IoT device.

Editor's note: This article was updated from 2024 to reflect the latest trends and predictions in IoT for 2025 and beyond.

Tom Coughlin is 2024 president and CEO of IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.