How AI Accelerates the Internet of Things Revolution

According to IDC, the global count of Internet‑connected devices and sensors is projected to climb from 11 billion in 2016 to a staggering 80 billion by 2025. Tushar Bhatnagar, IoT Project Manager at TechMahindra, explains that this explosive growth will generate unprecedented volumes of data, offering transformative insights across healthcare, manufacturing, urban planning, and autonomous mobility.

When harnessed correctly, this data can provide real‑time decision support for clinicians, drive operational efficiencies in factories, enable predictive maintenance, and power smart‑city infrastructures that anticipate traffic snarls or environmental hazards.

However, the sheer volume also presents several obstacles:

• Managing, analysing, and extracting actionable insights from heterogeneous data streams.
• Ensuring analysis is both rapid and accurate.
• Balancing centralized analytics with edge‑processing demands.
• Reconciling personalization needs with data‑privacy regulations.
• Maintaining robust security against evolving threats.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a strategic solution to these challenges, amplifying IoT’s impact across three key dimensions:

1. Predictive Intelligence – AI models can forecast equipment failures or demand surges, allowing pre‑emptive maintenance and resource allocation.
2. Prescriptive Analytics – Advanced sensors equipped with AI can recommend specific actions, such as routing autonomous vehicles away from detected hazards or alerting rail operators to track anomalies.
3. Adaptive Self‑Optimization – Continuous data feeds enable AI systems to learn optimal responses autonomously, exemplified by glucose‑monitoring wearables that adjust insulin delivery in real time.

In my view, IoT and AI are inseparable partners; each fuels the other’s evolution. IoT supplies the data foundation that AI refines into actionable knowledge, while AI provides the intelligence required to interpret that data at scale, ultimately enabling autonomous, self‑learning systems.

It’s time for organizations to let AI unlock the full potential of their IoT ecosystems.

— Tushar Bhatnagar, IoT Project Manager, TechMahindra