The Curious Case of Consumer IoT

Consumer IoT came into existence with huge promise of changing the way we live. Many of marketing videos of consumer durable companies promised that IoT will add convenience to our life, starting from smart window blinds that will move and make way for sunlight every morning activated the first rays of sun. A connected coffee maker and toast maker that will do their duty of brewing a fresh mug of that perfect coffee that you crave for every morning and keep those two slices of perfectly baked breads. However, four years down the line, we are still stuck with our life partner doing all these chores for us. However, the future is looking at revival of consumer IoT. But the expectations are more realistic this time.

The first wave ofconsumer IoT started with number of startups offering lifetime free subscription for home automation solutions. The offer appeared to be too good to be true, and some sane voices asked about the bill of keeping the cloud based platform afloat as the cost & complexity of managing such IoT platforms is considerable. Those initiatives how-much enthusiastic those were eventually led to eclipse of such services. For example Nest, one of early player in smart home hub domain shut down its Smart Home Hub (Revolve) platform in 2016. The primary reason for a company like Nest to risk losing the faith of market could be attributed to no concrete monetization strategy around such platform.

Similarly over the years we witnessed number of consumers IoT platforms going under. Like Iris Smart home platform from Lowes, Stringify by Comcast and most recently “Supported by Nest” API by Google. While the reason attributed behind these shutdown of services can be linked to the fact that most consumer IoT users are early adopters who want to tinker with technology and the value created for consumer comes very low in Maslow's hierarchy.

However, as the industry is finding innovative new use cases of IoT, this consumer technology is finding its ground by linking Insurance policy of users with consumer IoT products. For example many insurance providers are offering discount to their customers for deploying smart home monitoring or home safety solutions like Zurich Insurance. Similarly the ultimate consumer IoT device i.e. smart watches are now getting linked with health insurance with John Hancock linking its insurance policy with Discovery Vitality program, and users following physical activity goals gets rewarded for exhibiting positive behavior.

While this resurgence of consumer IoT has strong footing in benefits for insurers and customers, this era is at cusp of technology revolution that would lead to large scale adoption of IoT in daily life. This is a huge opportunity for all stakeholders throughout value chain, and the future growth of technology adoption is only going to be limited by technology enablers capability to churn out solutions for larger market.

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