Why is Internet of Things so hyped even as very few companies see it bear fruit on their bottom lines?

“IoT investment have trailed a lot of expectations as to when they were going to really jump in the enterprise,” said Tom Stuermer (pictured), global managing director of ecosystem partnerships at Accenture plc. Part of the problem is that they are stuck with historical data with no means to project into the future; another is the difficulty of choosing a suitable IoT platform.

“The infrastructure to implement IoT is very fragmented — there’s 360-some IoT platform providers out in the world,” Stuermer added. Companies must sift through this glut for technologies that fit their industry and use cases. 

“Where we’re seeing a lot of traction in using predictive analytics and AI for IoT is really coming in the verticals,” Stuermer told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this year’s When IoT Met AI: The Intelligence of Things conference in San Jose, California. (* Disclosure below.)

Industrial equipment manufacturers, for instance, own their stacks and can define all elements from the bottom up, Stuermer explained. They can collect telemetry data from equipment and even sell products back to customers with a service model.

IoT product engineer

Companies in other industries ought to follow suit and stitch together infrastructure that tracks and manages data from small segments of their businesses. The value from IoT lay in attacking small problems with detailed data analysis, Stuermer stated.

“I spent a lot of time in race car engineering in my younger days, and I actually did quants and analytics. And what we learned in that point is, as you learned about the data, you started to fundamentally change the architecture of the product,” Stuermer said.

This illustrates how companies can move forward with IoT and AI. Those that tailor IoT analysis to particular problems can feed those insights back into product-development and fine-tuning, he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of When IoT Met AI: The Intelligence of Things. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for When IoT Met AI. Neither Western Digital Corp., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE