In Simple Terms

Most computers on the internet have a person sitting at them. Phones, laptops, tablets. Someone types, someone clicks, the device sends. IoT covers everything else: the connected devices that send and receive data without anyone touching them in the moment. A weather sensor reporting temperature every minute. A van transmitting its location. A point-of-sale terminal sending a transaction. A smart fridge logging power use.

The number of these devices passed the number of human-operated devices years ago. IoT Analytics puts the global count at over 19 billion connected IoT devices in 2024, and projects more than 32 billion by 2030. Most of the growth is in industrial and commercial use, not consumer.

For an SMB, IoT is less a project than a quiet accumulation. You bought a smart thermostat for the office. You added GPS tracking to your vans. You upgraded to a connected card reader. Five years later you have a dozen connected devices and you have never once called any of it "IoT." That is normal.

Where IoT Shows Up in SMBs

Concrete examples by sector.

Retail and food. Square, Stripe Terminal, Shopify POS, and Toast are all IoT devices: connected card readers that send every transaction to the cloud in real time. Smart fridges and freezers in restaurants now ping the owner's phone when temperature drifts. Inventory scanners in small shops talk straight to ecommerce platforms.

Home services. HVAC companies use connected thermostats and equipment sensors to monitor client systems remotely, predict failures, and dispatch technicians before a unit dies. GPS fleet tracking (Verizon Connect, Samsara, Motive) tells dispatch where every van is and gives the customer an accurate ETA.

Hospitality and short-term rentals. Smart locks (August, Schlage, Yale) let Airbnb hosts give time-limited codes to guests without keys changing hands. Connected noise sensors (Minut, NoiseAware) flag parties before they damage a property. Smart thermostats reduce HVAC bills between guests.

Healthcare. Small clinics increasingly use connected blood pressure monitors, glucose monitors, and weight scales that report patient data directly into the EHR between appointments. Used carefully, this counts as remote patient monitoring and is reimbursable in many US Medicare contexts.

Office and operations. Connected printers, smart locks, security cameras, smart speakers, occupancy sensors. Often bought one at a time, often forgotten in the count.

Where AI Meets IoT (AIoT)

The combination of AI and IoT is sometimes called AIoT, and it shows up in two distinct ways.

AI on the device. Modern cameras can run small AI models locally to recognise objects, faces, or events without sending video to the cloud. This is called edge AI. The advantage is privacy, latency, and bandwidth: the camera does not need to ship the footage anywhere. A security camera that flags only "person in driveway" rather than streaming everything is doing edge AI on top of the IoT layer.

AI on the data. A fleet of GPS-tracked vans produces a stream of location data. An AI model on top of that data predicts which routes will be busy, which drivers are at risk of accidents, and when each vehicle will need maintenance. A connected HVAC system produces a stream of sensor readings. An AI model on top of that data predicts which unit will fail next.

The first kind (edge AI) makes the device smarter. The second kind (analytics) makes the business smarter. SMBs benefit most from the second, since it lifts value out of IoT data that was already being collected.