2024 Enterprise and IoT Trends

While 2024 brings exciting opportunities for the telecom industry, it also presents significant challenges. These include a weak global economy, higher interest rates, heavy capital and operational expenditures, declining revenue, and difficulties in monetizing new technologies. However, the rise of enterprise and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as the Industrial Metaverse, RedCap, and AIoT, offer promising avenues for positive growth.

The Metaverse may not have taken off in the consumer space as anticipated, but its potential as an industrial technology for businesses remains promising. By integrating technologies like AR/VR, AI, and digital twins, it can enable powerful new use cases, such as immersive environment for real-time interactions and collaboration, process optimization through predictive maintenance, and enterprise training "on-the-fly" to name a few. This brings immense opportunities for ecosystem of players - telecom operators with enterprise business boost, network equipment providers and module/sub-module manufacturers and semiconductor companies by equipping metaverse with much needed equipment, modules, and intelligent chips, respectively. TechInsights estimates a significant investment increase in industrial metaverse spending, enterprise metaverse software and services alone will be worth nearly US$ 78 billion in 2024.

This year will bring new wave of RedCap (Reduced Capability) devices as we enter in the 5G Advanced era with the 3GPP Release 18 closing in March 2024. Although the initial RedCap framework was defined in Release 17 but there are not many commercial RedCap devices available yet, this will change in 2024 as Release 18 will bring with it new advanced features for RedCap devices and trigger new 5G use cases as 5G Advanced features become widely deployed. TechInsights expects to see a surge in new RedCap devices leveraging on new Chips and roll-out of specific use cases by operators and enterprises. 2024 will see a spike in 5G RedCap devices according to the TechInsights' Cellular IoT Module Shipments by Technology Forecasts.

2024 will be a breakthrough year for integration of AI into IoT Devices (AIoT), owing to developments in Generative AI, Edge and 5G capabilities. We might not see fully embedded AIoT devices this year but at least we expect a lot of IoT devices with Generative AI capabilities. The convergence of AI and IoT will enable new use cases across industries such as advanced data analytics, improved real-time predictive maintenance and automation, as well as will have a major impact on sustainability with the help of optimized real-time energy consumption monitoring. With enormous growth of IoT devices and the data generated by those devices, AI becomes a critical mechanism to manage and add value to IoT-generated data.

TechInsights' forecasts that the number of connected devices in 2024 will reach 35 billion, providing immense opportunity to leverage AI capabilities along with other enabling technologies like 5G and Edge to further boost the potential of AIoT in a variety of industries.