In 2015, many research firms predicted the number of IoT devices in use by 2020.

• Gartner predicted connected IoT devices at 20.8 billion by 2020.
• IDC forecasted connected IoT devices at 29.5 billion by 2020.
• Cisco estimated connected IoT devices at 50 billion by 2020.

These predictions indicated that there would be a massive increase in IoT devices. That market hype may have been optimistic. The latest IoT Analytics “State of IoT—Spring 2023” report shows that global IoT connections grew by 18% in 2022 to 14.3 billion active IoT endpoints. In 2023, IoT Analytics expects the global number of connected IoT devices to grow another 16% to 16.7 billion active endpoints.

The vast investment in AI and Robotics may accelerate market demand for distributed sensory data putting commercial IoT devices back into an accelerated growth trajectory similar to the GPUs.
Worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) is forecast to be $805.7 billion in 2023, an increase of 10.6% over 2022, while growing to $1 trillion by 2026.

Read more from:
McKinsey on industrial automation
Qualcomm on satellite-enabled chips for the IoT

Additional research: Deloitte-Immersed and Connected