The IoT promised many advantages to customers, but for many of us, its only success has been filling our homes with useless “smart” gimmicks. Our many connected gadgets often refuse to talk to each other, governed by a bewildering ecosystem of apps that add more frustration than freedom.
So, where did the grand vision for the IoT get lost? IoT News caught up with Chitresh Sharma, Head of the Europe Insights Factory at L’Oréal, who offers a blunt diagnosis. He believes the industry has been so obsessed with the tech itself that it has completely forgotten about the people it’s supposed to serve.
Moving past just ‘Things’
The early days of IoT were all about novelty. A fridge that could order milk! A toaster you could turn on from your phone! The problem, Sharma argues, is that we never moved past this fascination with the “things”. The real magic isn’t in connecting a single object; it’s in creating an environment that understands you.
“What excites me most about the future of IoT and connected technology is not the ‘things’ themselves, but the seamless, almost magical, symphony they can create,” he says. “It’s about crafting an ecosystem where technology fades into the background, anticipating our needs with an intuition that feels deeply human.”
Sharma envisions a near future where “our environment intelligently adapts to us, not the other way around.” This is the goalpost of IoT success we should be aiming for: experiences so smooth and personal that they feel less like technology and more like life, just better.
The IoT today is a mess of devices shouting into the void, and it’s a problem of our own making. Sharma is clear that the barrier isn’t technical; it’s a fundamental lack of vision.
“The greatest challenge plaguing the IoT industry is a risk taking capabilities and lack of failure to imagine,” he observes. “Companies are sometimes overly focused on silicon, sensors, and standards, churning out a fragmented mess of ‘smart’ gadgets that don’t speak the same language. They’re building products, not experiences.”
This gets to the heart of why so many smart devices feel so unsatisfying. They exist in isolation.
“The real challenge isn’t technical; it’s a crisis of design and vision,” Sharma states. “We must move beyond the bits and bytes to create something truly beautiful, intuitive, and integrated that people will not just use, but love.”
A trend that actually matters for IoT success
In an industry addicted to buzzwords, we asked Sharma what trend businesses should actually be watching. His initial response was to the point: “Stop chasing trends.”
But then he got serious, pointing to a shift that he believes will separate the true innovators from the gadget-makers.
“The one trend that truly matters… is the explosion of intelligence at the edge,” he declares. This is about ending our reliance on distant, anonymous data centres.
“Forget the cloud. The future isn’t about shipping dumb sensor data to a server farm hundreds of miles away to get an answer back. That’s slow, inefficient, and a massive privacy vulnerability.”
The real innovation is putting a powerful brain inside the device itself. By running sophisticated AI right on the hardware, things can understand and react to the world in real-time, all without needing to phone home.
What this means in practice is faster responses, better privacy, and experiences that are truly personal to you. As Sharma puts it, “This is the trend that will define the next decade, turning simple connected objects into truly intelligent companions.”
Please, no more smart toasters
We’ve all seen the proliferation of smart gadgets that solve problems we never had. This has fuelled a massive misconception about what IoT is even for, and what success looks like.
“The most prevalent and maddening misconception is that IoT is about slapping a chip on every object in your house and calling it ‘smart’,” Sharma says. “A connected toaster is not innovation; it’s a gimmick. It’s a solution in search of a problem.”
And he’s right. The point isn’t to complicate our lives with an app for every appliance; it’s about using deeply integrated technology to solve real problems in a simple, elegant way.
“The goal isn’t to complicate our lives with a thousand different apps for a thousand different devices,” Sharma stresses, “but to simplify it in a truly fundamental way.”
So, how can companies avoid building the next connected toaster? For Sharma, it comes down to one golden rule, a piece of advice he considers both simple and the hardest thing for a tech company to do.
“Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” he advises. “Don’t you dare start with a piece of technology and then try to figure out where to sell it.”
It’s about obsessing over the user. It’s about asking “What beautiful, effortless experience can we create?” before you ever write a line of code or design a circuit board. This human-centric approach is the only way to create products that resonate on an emotional level.
Sharma’s final piece of advice for IoT success is one the entire industry should heed: “If you aren’t creating something that people will fall in love with, something that makes their life better in a meaningful way, then you’re just making another gadget. And the world has enough gadgets.”
Chitresh Sharma and the L’Oréal team will be sharing more of their insights at this year’s IoT Tech Expo Europe. Be sure to check out Sharma’s presentation on ‘Intelligent Reflections: Powering the Future with AI-Driven Digital Twins’ during the leading industry event.
See also: Davide Aurucci, Siemens: How AI is advancing the smart factory
Want to learn more about IoT from industry leaders? Check out IoT Tech Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here for more information.
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