The journey of the IoT has been marked with highs and lows, driven by both immense promise and a share of setbacks. Initially, the industry over-promised and undelivered, leading to skepticism. However, by 2025, IoT has transitioned into a mature phase, offering practical solutions rather than just lofty visions.
Over the past decade, the industry grappled with an imbalance between expectations and reality. Lofty ambitions led to unrealized dreams, with many companies facing financial difficulties. Yet, perseverance eventually bore fruit. The sector, without any grand gestures, recalibrated itself, discarding ineffective elements while enhancing its strengths.
By 2025, IoT moved away from speculative promise to robust implementation. The Things Industries, a crucial player, operates private low-power IoT networks across diverse sectors. Clients employ The Things Stack Cloud to link edge gateways and sensors, enabling seamless data transfer to operational systems. The use cases, though unglamorous, are vital. These include ensuring building safety, maintaining food quality, tracking livestock, and efficient water usage.
These applications are no longer just trials. They now form essential business infrastructure. Analysts often misjudge growth metrics due to IoT’s extended sales cycles. Despite this, the industry has seen steady 20% annual growth for five years, highlighting its evolving resilience.
The sector’s departure from sensationalism to substance is noteworthy. Historically, the hype around IoT overshadowed tangible progress, leading to cycles of disappointment. But now, real-world industrial changes align with industry advancements. This shift in focus has made the market healthier, defying traditional underestimations.
Today, enterprises seamlessly integrate IoT, not as experiments, but as integral to operations. This landscape, envisioned a decade ago, is now mature and scalable. As 2025 closes, IoT’s evolution continues to happen quietly, even as AI captures most of the spotlight. Despite AI’s dominance, its insatiable need for data fosters a symbiotic relationship with IoT. As Allen Proithis noted at a recent conference, “IoT is a data facilitation business and AI is the most hungriest consumer of data the world has seen.”
Industrial IoT generates the structured, continuous data AI requires, offering enterprises a competitive edge through proprietary information. The pace of IoT adoption around clear end-user value is impressive, even though the aim is not to create yet another hype cycle. As The Things Industries illustrates, real-world applications are thriving. Their platform links more than four million devices, processing over four billion monthly data points across diverse industries.
The industry’s focus on building operational margin is paramount. It’s not just about profit but ensuring systems’ reliability, improving planning, boosting R&D, and encouraging collaborative ventures. This shift is transforming technology into indispensable infrastructure, quietly redefining sectors.
Looking ahead to 2026, the conversation might shift from discussing IoT to broader concepts like data facilitation systems. The goal remains: to address enterprise challenges, enhance operations, and establish IoT as critical infrastructure, rather than become entangled in the next buzzword cycle.
