For CIOs and CISOs, the growth of IoT and AI in the “smart home” is becoming a key enterprise security challenge. With a remote workforce now the norm for many organisations, it’s expanding the traditional enterprise attack surface.
Research from IoT analyst firm Berg Insight shows that the number of smart homes across Europe and North America hit 139.4 million in 2024. That data quantifies a mainstream shift in technology that enterprise leaders need to watch.
North America leads, with 45 percent of all households (66.7 million homes) having at least one smart product. Europe, while catching up, has 72.7 million smart homes, hitting 31 percent market penetration.
These households are not just installing gadgets; they are installing complex whole-home systems. At the end of 2024, the installed base for these systems stood at 64.4 million in North America and 46.4 million in Europe. In North America, security providers like ADT and Vivint drive this, while in Europe, DIY solutions from firms like Shelly or Verisure are more common.
But no matter who provides the smart home system, the growth to over 100 million households is generating exabytes of data on human behaviour, energy use, and physical security. For an enterprise leader, this signals that the underlying platforms for security and automation are maturing fast.
This data is the raw material for the next generation of AI services, and the skills being honed in the consumer space are directly transferable to the enterprise. The insights derived from consumer behaviour today actively shape the AI models that enterprise platforms, from Google Vertex AI to AWS, will offer to businesses tomorrow.
This explosive growth creates a volatile mix. When an employee connects a corporate laptop to a home Wi-Fi network crowded with consumer IoT devices – often with default passwords and patchy firmware – the corporate perimeter simply dissolves. CISOs now face a “branch of one” environment that is inherently untrusted.
The smart home market’s growth is being fuelled by tangible benefits, not just novelty, which offers a key lesson for enterprise adoption.
As Martin Apelgren, Principal Analyst at Berg Insight, commented: “Smart home product categories that provide tangible benefits and value for households are anticipated to grow faster than segments where the value proposition is weak.”
Enhanced safety, cost-savings, and time-savings are the primary drivers of the smart home market’s growth.
This consumer-driven focus on a clear return on investment mirrors the challenge facing CIOs. A CFO is unlikely to approve a large-scale AI rollout – perhaps using platforms from IBM or Salesforce – without a clear, demonstrable link to efficiency or risk mitigation.
The next wave of this transformation is explicitly AI-driven. AI will move home systems beyond simple automation to predictive and adaptive environments.
CISOs must use this smart home data to mandate a full-scale review of remote work security for their enterprise. This reinforces the urgent need to accelerate a zero-trust architecture that assumes the local network is always compromised.
Staff who use seamless, predictive, and AI-driven environments at home will have little tolerance for clunky and disconnected enterprise systems. The pressure to modernise the digital employee experience is now coming from the outside world, not just internal surveys.
For their part, CTOs and Chief Data Officers can look to growth of the consumer IoT and smart home market as a high-speed laboratory for AI and data governance. Monitoring this space provides insights into which technologies truly scale and what “value” really means to an end-user.
As more businesses look to build their own “smart” enterprise environments, the security lessons and experiences from these 139 million homes are too valuable to ignore.
See also: How Amazon is using AI and IoT to help its workforce
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