Why Emojis May Be the Key to Employee Retention

The state of IoT in the U.S. companies: Frankly, I dread the Internet of Things. Samsung makes it out to be a charming ménage that will include my fridge, but the reality is more likely to be an endless stream of texts regarding the intimate details of my washer’s cycle. Meh.

That complaint registered, a new report prepared by Machina Research for the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) suggests that we’re all going to have a lot more stuff to reset whenever our ISPs hiccup. Based on 15-minute surveys completed by a relatively small group of 200 senior execs in companies with revenues of more than $10 million across industries, the TIA reports that 48% of U.S. businesses are already using IoT technologies, and another 43% will be joining them within the next two years. (In short, pretty much everybody.) And spending will follow suit: 44% of corporate IT budgets in 2020 will be dedicated to IoT.

The report further suggests that the corporate focus on IoT is shifting from its use as a straight-up enhancer of product revenue and profit to its use as a real-time data-generation machine that will yield valuable insights that can be used across the business. “The exciting take away is that U.S. companies have begun embracing the strategic and tactical value that IoT data contributes across the enterprise,” says study author Andy Castonguay, an analyst at Machina Research. “The study results point to the fact that a critical mass of U.S. enterprises has started to engage IoT solutions to enhance product design and development, inform operations and customer service, and enhance profitability.”

Aligning political and technological agendas: Tom Peters — yeah, that Tom Peters — recently told me that Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s The Second Machine Age was a particularly good read on our technological future. So is their article, “Human Work in the Robotic Future,” in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.

In it, the duo from MIT explore the kinds of government policies that will be necessary in an era of ever-smarter machines. “The choices made now will prove particularly consequential,” they write.