Soon, IoT will define how we live, work and play, claims study

Not all disruptive technologies give you results. They are in different stages of maturity and consulting firm KPMG has made an effort to bucket them in terms of investment and their impact. Its research paper 'Imagine a new connected world' released in association with India Mobile Congress and COAI traces the next wave of growth in telecommunications and technology in India.

Eight major disruptive technologies are bracketed into four - Table stakes, Strategic, Maturing and Nascent. The Table stakes are about technologies that "receive high investment and generate a strong impact today. They have reached an initial phase of business maturity but remain vigorously innovative and challenging to master". These technologies include data and analytics as well as cloud computing.

Strategic technologies, on the other hand, include Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The strategic bucket is about those that receive significant investment today in search of strong impact tomorrow.

They are medium-to-low in current impact, the study states.

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"The most immersive, intelligent and inventive of all technologies, IoT, will soon be ubiquitous, incorporated into how we live, work, and play. From smart homes and spaces to autonomous vehicles, to predictive and personalised medicine, IoT is going to take over the technology world, enabled by the underlying telecom infrastructure," the report mentions.

Blockchain also holds potential and saw wide implementation during 2019. The report states that Blockchain's "applications will continue to expand going forward. It is continuing to receive investments across sectors such as technology, retail, logistics, and financial services. The use cases extend beyond crypto-currency".

The Maturing bucket (generates strong impact but no longer requires high investment) includes Robotic Process Automation (RPA), social networking and collaborating technologies. Augmented reality and virtual reality are nascent or future stars - they received lesser levels of investment and have yet to generate serious impact.

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The survey also ranked industries that could be disrupted by emerging technologies. IoT, for instance, is expected to disrupt retail, telecom-media-technology (TMT) and automobiles. RPA could disrupt financial services, TMT and retail. AI could disrupt healthcare, TMT and financial services.

The report, nevertheless, warns of the digital risk. "Adoption of multiple digital technologies by the enterprises exposes them to a myriad of vulnerabilities impacting consumer's privacy. $1.57 million was the average cost of data breaches in India in 2017. Further, a data breach could ruin the reputation of an organisation, thereby affecting their business," it states.

The report found that 57 per cent of companies which have commenced work on digital transformation do not have a digital risk strategy yet. Among emerging technologies, IoT is perceived to pose the highest data privacy risk.

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