3 Trends That Will Dominate IoT in 2025

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Welcome to 2025!

A new year always brings fresh opportunities, evolving challenges, and a chance to recalibrate. The rapid advance of AI continues to shape every corner of the tech landscape, but that’s not the only seismic change on the horizon. Here are three key trends that are set to dominate IoT in 2025.

AI Advances

2024 saw AI take a big step into the mainstream with OpenAI’s release of its GPT-4o model, Google’s new Gemini Pro subscriptions for Google One, and Microsoft’s introduction of a Copilot key on its PC keyboards — the first new key in three decades. This year could bring another transformative leap with the advent of AI “agents” capable of executing real-world tasks like controlling IoT devices or automating complex workflows.

But whether or not 2025 delivers on this promise, the increasing profile of AI will shift and transform the utility of IoT data. It will be increasingly practical, necessary even, to deploy and update IoT networks to deliver insights using AI-trained models at the edge. Avalanches of data from cameras and sensors that would have been too overwhelming to be useful to human operators are exactly the raw material that an AI-first approach requires; leading to game-changing insights and capabilities across industries and use cases.

Looming Legislation

This year marks the beginning of a three-year transition period before the implementation of the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), an attempt to enforce a higher standard of security among a wide range of devices that connect directly or indirectly to networks. As this legislation takes hold, IoT devices will bear the brunt of the burden.

The CRA creates a new, strict standard for companies to monitor for vulnerabilities, implement additional security features, and ensure the availability of essential functions even in the wake of incidents, carrying penalties for non-compliance that include being banned from the EU market entirely.

Though the CRA does not apply in full until the end of 2027, the clock is now ticking for all subject parties who produce IoT devices or maintain an affected network to figure out how to meet the legal demands before three years are up.

Shifting Spectrum

The 5G-Advanced specification, locked in by the 3GPP standards association in the summer of 2024, is now available to 5G equipment vendors, marking the beginning of the network’s adoption in the United States. Enabling transfer speeds of 10 Gbps down and 1 Gbps up, alongside expanded MIMO configurations and more robust support for augmented, virtual, and mixed reality experience, 5G-Advanced adoption opens new avenues for IoT development. Likewise, Wi-FI 7 is clearing the final bureaucratic hurdles to its widespread deployment, offering lower latency and faster connections.

But the changes aren’t just new tech. 2025 will also see AT&T decommission its NB-IoT network, leaving T-Mobile and Verizon to absorb its remaining customers. Meanwhile, 2025 will all but certainly be the end of 2G in the United States as T-Mobile, the last remaining holdout, prepares to shutter its 2G business by the end of the year. As networks retire older technologies, IoT devices relying on them will need upgrades to avoid obsolescence.

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Is Your IoT Security Strategy Scalable?

Internet of Things (IoT) security is an unavoidable conversation. Attacks against connected devices keep rising and will only become more threatening as networks grow in scale and variety. While many businesses already recognize the need for better protection, the importance of a scalable IoT security strategy is easier to overlook.

🔥 Rapid Fire

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• Qualcomm unveils on-premises AI, IoT innovations at CES

• Synaptics and Google join forces on next-gen edge AI for IoT

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🎙️ The IoT For All Podcast

This week, we spoke to Dominik Obermaier, co-founder and CTO of HiveMQ, about unified namespace (UNS). The conversation covered how UNS eases new data architecture adoption and is changing how enterprises think about data, what makes UNS different from other data architectures, IT/OT convergence, MQTT, trends in industrial data management, transitioning to unified namespace, and UNS use cases.

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