What will the next decade of development of China's Internet of Things industry look like?

2009-2019 is the first 10 years of the development of China's Internet of Things industry, and 2020 will be the starting point of the next 10 years. In order to better welcome the next decade, this article will provide a detailed interpretation of the development trend of AIoT.

 
2009-2019 is the first 10 years of the development of China's Internet of Things industry, and 2020 will be the starting point of the next 10 years.
 
In order to better welcome the next decade, this article will provide a detailed interpretation of the development trend of AIoT.

AIoT is the cellular fusion of various technological civilizations.
 
At the "2020 AIoT Vane Conference" held on January 9, I gave a keynote speech entitled "AIoT Vane: Interpretation of AIoT Future Trends", which refined the recent in-depth observations of the IoT think tank on the IoT field.
 
Some trends are gradually emerging, and some thoughts are just beginning. I will share the full content with you here to start a discussion and look forward to hearing your views.

In 2019, the evolution of IoT to AIoT became a clear trend, and this trend will continue in 2020.
 
The key to the development of IoT lies in virtual data, and the  key to the development of AI lies in physical terminals. In other words, IoT will inevitably "move from the real to the virtual", and AI will inevitably "move from the virtual to the real". The two need each other and will eventually converge into "AIoT", creating value through intersection.
 

 
From the current situation, most IoT projects have incorporated elements of artificial intelligence during their implementation. AI capabilities on the terminal side, edge side, and cloud side have become standard configurations for various IoT application solutions, and users are increasingly willing to make decisions based on AI.
 
AIoT is no longer a solution explored by all parties involved. In the future, IoT solutions that do not incorporate AI capabilities will become less and less competitive.
 
On the road to the evolution of the Internet of Things to the Intelligent Network AIoT, companies have two major innovation directions:
 
one is horizontal data flow, which is reflected in the data flow between layers (cloud, pipe, and terminal) and across industries and links;

The second is vertical data empowerment, which is divided into big data empowerment of the platform and on-site empowerment on the edge side.
 

 
In addition to artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, many concepts, such as Blockchain, Cloud, Big Data, Edge Computing, Smart Home, 5G, etc., have the same underlying logic and are actually talking about the same thing: intelligent civilization is replacing industrial civilization. It
 
is easy to understand the Internet of Things as a new technology, but it is more of a fusion of various technological civilizations.
 

 
Today, each of us is in a rapidly changing situation, with changing speed, ecology, and services.
 
In the past 10 years, we have seen that the Internet of Things seems to be a slow-heating industry. Previously, many well-known research institutions have released forecast data for the Internet of Things, almost all of which believe that by 2020, the Internet of Things will form a scale of tens of billions of connections and a market scale of several trillion US dollars. However, based on the current facts, these institutions have basically not met their original expectations.
 
However, recently, the entire industry is quietly accelerating.
 
Taking the latest progress of LPWAN low-power wide area network as an example, NB-IoT has accelerated its development year by year, and China's NB-IoT commercial use has been in the global leading ranks. So far, the three major operators have deployed more than 900,000 NB-IoT base stations to provide ubiquitous network resources for Internet of Things users. The number of NB-IoT connections is nearly 70 million, of which the connections of the two major industries of gas meters and water meters have exceeded 10 million respectively; the number of connections for applications such as smoke detection and electric vehicle monitoring has reached millions; and emerging million-level applications such as asset tracking, street lights, parking, and door locks continue to emerge.
 
NB-IoT is just a representative. The development speed of 5G is obviously faster than 3G and 4G, and the iteration speeds of industrial Internet and traditional industrial control are also different.
 

 
Driven by data, the ecosystem is changing.
 
At this point, it is better to tell a story so that everyone can feel the trend of AIoT explosion more intuitively. In
 
July 2019, Tao Jianhui, a legendary 50-year-old programmer and founder of Taosi Data, announced that the company's independently developed IoT big data platform TDengine would be open source. Tao Jianhui put more than 100,000 lines of C language code written by him and the Taosi Data team in the past two years on the open source community GitHub and selflessly shared it with developers around the world.
 
To his surprise, TDengine instantly rushed to the top of GitHub's comprehensive trend ranking, adding 1,908 stars in just one day. Now, TDengine's Star has exceeded 10,000, and the number of forks has exceeded 2,800.
 
Countless AIoT users use Taosi's products to manage their own data. The number of downloads of TDengine directly reflects the user's urgent need to manage AIoT time series data.
 
TDengine is a tool. People are choosing tools, and tools are also choosing people. This is a two-way selection process. All kinds of data and tools will always flow to the hands of those who can maximize their value.
 
With the flow of tools and data, the entire ecosystem is also subtly changed.
 

 
In this era of changing speed and ecology, any enterprise should have a core capability, that is, the ability to evolve business, so services are also changing.
 
It is not talent that determines who you are, but choice.
 
From commodity economy to service economy, and then to experience economy, business competition has its own inherent laws, and it is a pursuit of interests. In this pursuit process, due to the difference in the evolution of business genes, some enterprises prosper and some enterprises go bankrupt. The more intense the business competition, the faster the growth of high-quality enterprises and the elimination of inferior enterprises will be.
 

 
Because of the above changes, the relationship between enterprises has been reconstructed. Resource integration, platform integration, industry integration...Industry cooperation relationships have gradually evolved from competition to collaboration and symbiosis.
 
Ten years ago, there was a best-selling book called "Open Growth: Business Trends", one of the viewpoints of which was "the business trend is from value chain to value network". In the field of AIoT, we have clearly observed this phenomenon. The
 
traditional value chain is linked one by one, with clear division of labor and technical standards between upstream and downstream industries, and business models and cooperative relationships have also experienced long-term running-in and tended to be stable.
 
The development of new technologies such as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence is driving practitioners to break the tradition and "focus on customers". The closer to customers, the better, and the shorter the industrial chain, the better, and the development of technology has created conditions for this subversion.
 
Each link of the industrial chain is expected to have a leader who integrates others. In this way, the leading enterprise can formulate technical standards that are beneficial to itself around the end customers. This competition will break the original industrial order. The final result may be two forms of expression: rebuilding the industrial chain in terms of production and manufacturing; presenting a networked approach in terms of business model. Not only can a certain link skip the intermediate link and even establish a connection with the end user, but it can also provide products for other industrial chains in the traditional sense.
 
This kind of industrial networking brings greater imagination and development space to AIoT, and also cultivates soil for innovation in cooperation methods.

The intelligent Internet is creating a brand new ecology, data, scenarios, and applications, and investment and financing around the intelligent Internet is developing rapidly. Here, we have summarized the latest investment and financing data around the intelligent Internet.
 

 
In the context of the fundraising winter in the past year, investment in intelligent Internet of Things projects remains high. In
 
2019, a total of 137 intelligent Internet of Things companies received investment. In the overall investment distribution in the past few years, intelligent Internet of Things companies at the application layer received the most attention from capital, with 271 investment and financing events, which is highly consistent with the value distribution in the intelligent Internet of Things architecture.
 
AIoT is a very long industrial chain, including perception, network, platform, application and software integration. The top link, that is, the application layer, accounts for the highest proportion, and AIoT will continue to increase the proportion of this link.
 

 
Based on the tracking, we have summarized the predictions of well-known foreign research institutions and opinion leaders on the development trend of the intelligent Internet in 2020. Most of them are positive, but negative concerns should also be paid attention to.
 
Based on China, we have observed 5 important trends in AIoT.
 

 
Trend 1: More companies realize that AIoT is a reconstruction
of organization, management and business model. Imagine if your users, consumers and customers are already accustomed to the digital experience, how can the company still stand still? In a recent speech, Chen Chunhua, Dean of the BiMBA Business School of Peking University National School of Development, mentioned that at this stage, companies should consider how to solve the relationship between people, organization and efficiency, solve the relationship between cost and customer value, and finally the relationship between organization and external coordination. This is the first thing we have to do, and we must look at management as a whole.
 
Empowering grassroots teams, stimulating the subjective initiative of small teams, and building agile and efficient teams that adapt to the environment are the highlights of this round of organizational change.