The internet of everything – Our relationship with the internet –

Introduction

Approximately 5.45 billion people used the internet in 2024, and the average person now spends six hours and forty-five minutes per day staring at screens that connect them to a global network touching every aspect of their existence. The Internet of Everything represents the next evolution of this connectivity, extending beyond devices to integrate people, processes, data, and physical objects into a single intelligent ecosystem that shapes how we work, communicate, heal, learn, and live. Cisco coined the term to describe a world where the intelligent connection between these four pillars creates value that none of them could generate independently or in isolation from each other. This is no longer a distant concept sketched on conference whiteboards by futurists hoping to impress venture capital audiences with grand visions. It is happening now in your pocket, your home, your office, your car, your hospital, and your city in ways both visible and invisible to you every single day. Our relationship with the internet has transformed from an activity we occasionally perform into an ambient condition we permanently inhabit, raising questions about dependency, wellbeing, privacy, and what it means to be human in an age where everything is connected. By 2030, the average person worldwide is expected to interact with approximately fifteen connected devices daily, and global IoT device volumes are projected to reach 75 billion units, creating a digital fabric so pervasive that opting out becomes practically impossible.

Featured Snippets

What is the Internet of Everything?

The Internet of Everything is a framework originally coined by Cisco that connects people, processes, data, and things into a single intelligent ecosystem, extending beyond the Internet of Things by adding human interaction and process intelligence to device connectivity.

How much time do people spend online daily?

People worldwide spend an average of six hours and forty-five minutes per day on internet-connected screens, with US adults averaging seven hours and two minutes daily and 41% of American adults reporting they are online almost constantly.

How many connected devices will exist by 2030?

Global IoT device volumes are projected to reach approximately 75 billion units by 2025 and continue rising to 32.1 billion actively connected devices by 2030, with the average person expected to interact with about 15 connected devices daily.

Key Takeaways

• IoT devices are projected to generate 79.4 zettabytes of data by 2025, and the number of connected devices worldwide is expected to climb from 22.4 billion in 2026 to 39.6 billion by 2033, embedding connectivity into virtually every aspect of daily life.
• The Internet of Everything connects people, processes, data, and things into a unified intelligent ecosystem, going beyond the Internet of Things by incorporating human interaction and business process intelligence into the connectivity framework.
• Global average screen time has reached six hours and forty-five minutes per day across all devices, with 41% of US adults reporting they are online almost constantly and 63% of adults aged 18-29 describing their internet use as near-permanent.
• The OECD found that higher levels of personal screen time are consistently associated with poorer wellbeing outcomes across 14 countries, including increased rates of poor mental health, low life satisfaction, and diminished sense of purpose.

The Framework That Connects Everything to Everyone

The Internet of Everything is an overarching conceptual framework, originally coined by Cisco, that extends the Internet of Things by connecting not just devices but also people, processes, and data into a single intelligent network that generates actionable insights and enables smarter decision-making. Unlike IoT, which focuses primarily on machine-to-machine communication, IoE emphasizes the holistic ecosystem where machine-to-people and technology-assisted people-to-people interactions create value that pure device connectivity cannot achieve alone. The four pillars of IoE are people, processes, data, and things, and ignoring any one of these pillars leads to siloed systems that capture only a fraction of the potential value.

How the Internet Became the Air We Breathe

Three decades ago, the internet was a place you visited by sitting down at a desk, connecting a modem, and waiting for a dial-up tone that signaled your temporary entry into a digital world distinct from your physical reality. That separation between online and offline life has been systematically erased by smartphones, wearables, smart home devices, connected vehicles, and ambient computing systems that require no conscious effort to access. The transition happened in stages: first we carried the internet in our pockets, then we wore it on our wrists, then we embedded it in our homes, and now it permeates our cities, hospitals, factories, and farms without anyone needing to press a button to activate it.

Pew Research Center’s 2025 survey found that 90% of US adults use the internet daily, with 41% reporting they are online almost constantly throughout their waking hours. Among adults aged 18 to 29, that figure rises to 63% who describe their internet presence as essentially permanent, never fully disconnecting from the network even during sleep. The smartphone became the primary instrument of this transformation, with global ownership reaching 6.8 billion users and smartphones accounting for 53% of total screen time across all devices worldwide. The average American adult now spends four hours and two minutes per day on their smartphone alone, checking it approximately 58 times throughout the day in patterns that researchers describe as compulsive rather than intentional.

The shift from occasional internet visitor to permanent internet inhabitant represents the most significant change in human communication patterns since the invention of written language thousands of years ago. Every aspect of social interaction, commercial transaction, information consumption, entertainment, healthcare management, and civic participation now flows through internet-connected channels that mediate our experience of reality itself. The concept of automation versus AI becomes crucial in understanding this transformation because the systems shaping our daily digital experiences combine mechanical automation of data processing with genuine artificial intelligence that adapts to our behavior patterns and preferences. The internet has not merely become ubiquitous; it has become invisible, operating in the background of our lives the way electricity does, noticed only in its rare absence rather than its constant presence.

The Four Pillars That Hold the IoE Together

People form the first pillar of the Internet of Everything, connecting to the network in increasingly intimate and continuous ways through wearables, implantables, smartphones, and brain-computer interfaces that blur the boundary between biological and digital identity. In the IoE framework, people are not merely users of technology but active nodes that generate data, make decisions, and provide the contextual intelligence that gives machine-generated information its meaning and actionable value. The wearable health monitor on your wrist does not just collect heart rate data; it connects that data to your physician’s treatment process, your insurance company’s risk assessment algorithms, and your personal health goals in a continuous feedback loop that shapes medical decisions.

Data represents the second pillar, encompassing the vast streams of information generated by connected devices and human interactions that are analyzed to extract insights and drive decision-making at every level of society and commerce. IoT devices alone are projected to generate 79.4 zettabytes of data by 2025, a volume so enormous that processing and extracting meaningful intelligence from it requires artificial intelligence systems operating across cloud, edge, and local computing infrastructure simultaneously. The raw data becomes valuable only when processes, the third pillar, transform it into actionable intelligence by delivering the right information to the right person or machine at the right time in the most appropriate format.

Things, the fourth pillar, encompass the physical devices, sensors, actuators, and smart objects that collect and transmit data while interacting with the physical world in ways that create tangible outcomes. The best examples of IoT in retail illustrate how connected sensors track inventory, monitor customer behavior, optimize supply chains, and personalize shopping experiences in real time across thousands of locations simultaneously. In the IoE vision, a thing is not limited to electronic devices; it includes any physical object that can be made addressable and given the ability to transmit or receive data, from a shipping container to a piece of clothing to a section of highway pavement.

The transformative power of IoE emerges not from any single pillar operating independently but from the compound impact of all four pillars working together in ways that create emergent intelligence impossible to achieve through any individual connection. A smart thermostat acting alone is IoT; a smart thermostat connected to your calendar, your utility company’s grid load data, your physician’s recommendation for optimal sleep temperature, and your energy usage patterns across seasons is IoE. The distinction matters because it reveals why simply adding more connected devices to a network does not automatically create the value that IoE promises. The connections between pillars, not the devices themselves, generate the intelligence that makes the ecosystem transformative.

How Six Hours and Forty-Five Minutes Defines Our Daily Lives

The global average of six hours and forty-five minutes of daily screen time represents more than a statistic; it represents a fundamental reallocation of human attention, social energy, and cognitive resources away from offline activities toward internet-mediated experiences. That figure translates to approximately 70 full days per year spent interacting with screens, which means the average person devotes roughly 20% of their entire waking life to digital engagement across smartphones, computers, tablets, and televisions. The pandemic accelerated this trend dramatically, but the trajectory has not reversed; average screen time in the United States stabilized at seven hours and two minutes for adults, suggesting that pandemic-era habits have become permanent behavioral patterns.

The distribution of this screen time reveals important patterns about how our relationship with the internet has evolved beyond information access into something more consuming and psychologically complex. Social media alone claims an average of two hours and twenty-three minutes per day globally, with TikTok users spending approximately ninety minutes daily on the platform alone, making it the single most time-consuming social media application in existence. Smartphones account for the majority of this digital engagement, with mobile devices consuming four hours and thirty-seven minutes of the global average, making the phone in your pocket the most used object in your daily life by a significant margin over any other possession.

The age-related patterns in screen time usage tell a particularly revealing story about how our relationship with the internet differs across generations and life stages. Young adults aged 18 to 29 lead all demographics in internet dependency, with 63% describing themselves as almost constantly online according to Pew Research Center’s 2025 survey data collected across the United States. Gen Z teenagers report screen time exceeding nine hours per day in some countries, and 82% of Gen Z users acknowledge that they have a problem with their digital consumption habits. The pattern of knowing that screen time is excessive while feeling unable to reduce it mirrors the psychological signature of dependency rather than simple preference or lifestyle choice.

The most troubling aspect of our screen time statistics is not the total hours but the compulsive, fragmented nature of digital engagement that researchers describe as fundamentally different from intentional technology use. Checking a phone 58 times per day means interrupting real-world activities every 15 to 20 minutes throughout waking hours, creating a constant state of divided attention that affects cognitive performance, emotional regulation, and relationship quality simultaneously. The architecture of AI and the entertainment industry deliberately designs these interruption patterns through notification systems, algorithmic feeds, and variable-reward mechanisms that exploit the same neurological pathways as gambling to maintain user engagement. Understanding this design intentionality is essential for anyone trying to develop a healthier relationship with their connected devices.

What Constant Connectivity Does to Mental Health

The OECD’s landmark 2025 study across 14 countries, conducted in collaboration with Cisco through the Digital Well-being Hub, found that higher levels of personal screen time are consistently associated with poorer subjective wellbeing outcomes across all three measures they examined. People spending five or more hours daily on personal screens showed significantly higher rates of poor mental well-being as measured by the WHO-5 Index, lower life satisfaction, and diminished eudaimonia, which refers to one’s sense of meaning and purpose in life. The relationship held across diverse countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, India, Brazil, and South Africa, suggesting that the impact of digital engagement on wellbeing transcends cultural boundaries.

The mental health implications are particularly acute for young people, whose developmental neurology makes them more vulnerable to the attention-fragmenting and social-comparison effects that dominate social media platforms and algorithmically curated content feeds. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions in 2025 confirmed that digital addiction among youth is associated with significantly elevated risks of anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, and reduced academic performance across multiple countries and cultural contexts. Among US teenagers, 72% of Gen Z respondents believe their mental health would improve if the apps they use were designed to be less addictive, revealing a striking awareness of the problem combined with a perceived inability to solve it individually.

Loneliness emerges as a critical mediating factor in the relationship between screen time and mental health, according to the OECD analysis that found perceived social disconnection amplifies the negative effects of digital engagement on subjective wellbeing. People who feel lonely and spend extensive time online experience worse outcomes than either lonely people who spend less time online or socially connected people who spend the same amount of time on screens, suggesting an interaction effect rather than a simple dose-response relationship. The promise of working with AI in human-machine collaboration includes developing AI systems that can detect and intervene when digital engagement patterns indicate deteriorating mental health rather than enhancing wellbeing.

The challenge is not that internet connectivity is inherently harmful but that the current design of most digital platforms optimizes for engagement metrics that correlate with addictive usage patterns rather than user wellbeing. The business model that funds most internet services depends on maximizing time spent and attention captured, creating structural incentives that work against the healthy, intentional technology use that digital wellbeing researchers recommend. Solving this misalignment requires regulatory intervention, platform redesign, and individual digital literacy, but the concentration of power among a small number of technology companies that profit from current engagement patterns makes voluntary change unlikely without external pressure.

Smart Cities and the Promise of Connected Urban Life

The Internet of Everything finds its most ambitious expression in the smart city concept, where connected sensors, AI-powered analytics, and integrated urban systems promise to make cities more liveable, efficient, and sustainable for their residents. Smart traffic systems use connected cameras, sensors, and AI to optimize signal timing in real time, reducing congestion, fuel consumption, and commute times for millions of drivers simultaneously across the road network. Smart lighting systems adjust brightness based on pedestrian traffic, weather conditions, and time of day, reducing energy consumption while maintaining safety standards that protect people walking through public spaces.

Nearly 81% of individuals surveyed believe that smart cities are achievable through widespread IoT adoption, reflecting genuine public optimism about the potential for connected technology to improve urban life quality. The applications of AI and smart cities extend far beyond traffic management to encompass waste collection optimization, water quality monitoring, air pollution tracking, emergency response coordination, and energy grid management that collectively reduce the environmental footprint of urban living. Smart waste management systems use sensors in bins to optimize collection routes, reducing fuel consumption and emissions while ensuring that overflowing containers are emptied before they create sanitation problems in neighborhoods.

The healthcare dimension of connected cities illustrates how IoE principles can directly improve and potentially save lives through continuous monitoring and rapid response systems. Wearable devices monitoring chronic conditions like diabetes can connect to smart pill dispensers that automatically dispense medication when blood sugar levels fall below safe thresholds, simultaneously updating the patient’s electronic health records and notifying their physician if intervention is needed. This kind of multi-system integration, connecting a wearable sensor, a medication device, a health record, and a healthcare provider, embodies the IoE vision of creating value through the connections between pillars rather than through any single device operating in isolation.

The tension between the genuine benefits of smart city infrastructure and the surveillance capabilities that the same technology enables represents one of the most important societal debates of the coming decade. A city that knows where every person is, what every vehicle is doing, and how every resource is being consumed has extraordinary power to optimize services but also extraordinary power to monitor, control, and restrict its citizens in ways that threaten fundamental freedoms. The lessons from China’s social credit system demonstrate that connected infrastructure can be deployed for social control as easily as it can be deployed for public benefit, depending entirely on the governance framework and values of the institutions that operate it.

Privacy in a World Where Everything Listens

The security and privacy challenges created by the Internet of Everything are qualitatively different from those of the traditional internet because IoE involves physical sensors embedded in intimate spaces that capture data about bodily functions, home activities, conversation content, and movement patterns continuously. Every smart speaker, connected thermostat, wearable health monitor, and vehicle infotainment system collects data that reveals deeply personal information about the people who use them, from sleep patterns and heart rhythms to emotional states inferred from voice tone analysis and browsing behavior. The aggregation of data from multiple IoE devices creates comprehensive behavioral profiles that can predict individual actions, preferences, and vulnerabilities with unsettling accuracy.

The scale of data generation in IoE environments exceeds anything that traditional cybersecurity frameworks were designed to protect, with IoT networks generating approximately 847 zettabytes of data annually by 2021 and that volume growing exponentially as device deployment accelerates. Each connected device represents a potential entry point for cyberattacks, and the diversity of IoE devices, from industrial sensors to children’s toys, means that security standards vary wildly across the ecosystem. The importance of AI and cybersecurity becomes paramount in IoE environments because the volume and velocity of data flowing through these networks make traditional human-monitored security approaches inadequate to detect threats in real time.

Approximately 54% of enterprises report using IoT solutions primarily to reduce operational costs, which creates a structural incentive to deploy connected sensors broadly while investing minimally in the security and privacy protections that make that deployment responsible. The economic calculus of IoE implementation often treats privacy protection as a cost center rather than a value proposition, leading to deployments where data collection capabilities far outpace the governance frameworks needed to ensure that collected data is used ethically and stored securely against unauthorized access.

The fundamental privacy challenge of IoE is that informed consent becomes practically impossible when the number, capabilities, and data flows of connected devices surrounding an individual exceed any reasonable person’s ability to understand and evaluate them. No one reads the privacy policies of their smart TV, thermostat, fitness tracker, car, doorbell camera, voice assistant, and smart refrigerator individually, let alone understands how the data from these devices is combined, analyzed, shared with third parties, and stored across cloud services in multiple jurisdictions with different legal protections. The concept of what a VPN is and why you need one addresses only a fraction of the privacy challenge because VPNs protect internet traffic but do nothing to prevent the IoE devices themselves from collecting and transmitting data about your physical environment and biological state.

The Digital Divide in an Everything-Connected World

The promise of the Internet of Everything remains unevenly distributed across populations defined by income, geography, age, disability status, and gender, creating digital divides that risk amplifying existing social inequalities rather than reducing them. Pew Research Center’s 2025 data shows that Americans with the lowest household incomes are far less likely than higher-income peers to subscribe to broadband internet at home, despite broadband being increasingly essential for healthcare access, education, employment, and civic participation in the modern economy. Rural households report higher dependence on smartphones as their primary internet device compared to urban households, which limits their ability to participate fully in IoE-enabled services designed for broadband connectivity.

The global gender gap in mobile internet access remains significant, with women in low and middle-income countries 14 percentage points less likely than men to use mobile internet, and the gap widening to 32% in South Asia and 29% in Sub-Saharan Africa. Closing this gap could increase economic activity by an estimated $524 billion, according to industry analyses, which illustrates that digital exclusion carries concrete economic costs for entire regions and demographic groups beyond the individual inconvenience of not having internet access. About 57% of US households are expected to adopt smart home devices by the end of 2025, but this adoption is concentrated among higher-income, urban, younger demographics while older adults, rural residents, and lower-income households are systematically left behind.

As IoE becomes the infrastructure through which essential services are delivered, the digital divide transforms from a technology access problem into a civil rights issue with implications for healthcare equity, educational opportunity, economic mobility, and democratic participation. A senior citizen who cannot navigate a telehealth platform, a rural family without broadband access to remote learning, and a low-income household priced out of smart home technology that reduces energy costs all experience concrete harm from digital exclusion that compounds existing disadvantages. The conversation about whether AI could replace humans in various roles must include consideration of who benefits and who is excluded when AI-powered IoE systems become the default delivery mechanism for services that were previously accessible through analog channels available to everyone.

Children Growing Up as Digital Natives in an IoE World

The relationship between children and internet-connected technology presents unique challenges that differ qualitatively from adult digital engagement because children’s developing brains are more susceptible to the attention-capturing, reward-seeking, and social-comparison mechanisms built into most digital platforms. The Internet Matters Children’s Wellbeing in a Digital World Index 2026 found that the most striking change over four years of tracking is the increasing amount of time children spend online and their growing struggle to regulate this usage on their own without parental intervention. Among American families, 74% of parents report that their two-year-old watches television, 49% of children aged zero to two interact with smartphones, and 93% of children aged five to eight regularly watch TV content.

The implications for child development extend beyond screen time quantity to encompass the quality and nature of digital interactions that shape cognitive, social, and emotional development during critical periods of brain maturation. US teenagers spend over three hours per day watching TV or videos and an additional one hour and twenty-seven minutes on social media, cumulatively occupying a substantial portion of the time previously available for physical activity, face-to-face social interaction, unstructured play, and sleep that developmental research consistently identifies as essential for healthy childhood development. Children born into IoE environments may never experience the clear boundary between digital and physical reality that previous generations took for granted as a natural aspect of growing up.

The most urgent ethical question raised by children’s immersion in IoE is whether the current generation of connected technology was designed with children’s developmental needs in mind or whether children are simply exposed to systems optimized for adult engagement and monetization. The persistent levels of online harm documented in the Children’s Wellbeing Index, including cyberbullying, exposure to inappropriate content, and privacy violations, suggest that the safety mechanisms built into most platforms are inadequate for protecting young users whose judgment and self-regulation capabilities are still maturing. Parental involvement remains the primary protective factor, with 60% of US parents actively limiting their children’s screen time, but the pervasiveness of connected technology in schools, social groups, and entertainment makes comprehensive parental oversight increasingly difficult.

How IoE Is Transforming Healthcare Beyond Hospital Walls

Healthcare represents one of the most compelling applications of the Internet of Everything because the integration of wearable sensors, electronic health records, AI diagnostics, and connected medical devices creates continuous monitoring capabilities that traditional episodic care models cannot achieve. Patients wearing connected monitors can track blood glucose, heart rhythm, blood pressure, sleep quality, and physical activity levels continuously, generating data streams that feed directly into clinical decision support systems and alert healthcare providers to concerning trends before they become medical emergencies requiring hospitalization.

The IoE healthcare model moves medicine from reactive treatment of symptoms to proactive management of health trajectories, potentially extending healthy lifespan while reducing the cost of chronic disease management that consumes the majority of healthcare spending in developed economies. Remote patient monitoring reduces hospital readmissions, enables aging in place for elderly patients who would otherwise require institutional care, and provides specialists with continuous data rather than the snapshot view that traditional office visits offer at intervals of weeks or months between appointments. The evolution toward automation in healthcare systems that connect patient data, provider workflows, and medical devices into a unified IoE framework promises to improve both clinical outcomes and operational efficiency simultaneously.

The privacy tensions in healthcare IoE are particularly acute because medical data is among the most sensitive personal information that connected devices can collect, and the consequences of unauthorized access or misuse are correspondingly severe. A wearable monitor that continuously tracks heart rhythm generates a data stream that reveals not only cardiac health but also stress levels, sleep patterns, physical activity, and potentially emotional states, information that health insurers, employers, and advertisers would find commercially valuable if they could access it. The balance between the genuine clinical benefits of continuous health monitoring and the privacy risks of creating detailed digital records of every biological function requires governance frameworks that do not yet exist in most jurisdictions, leaving patients to navigate this tension individually without adequate regulatory protection.

The Environmental Paradox of Connected Everything

The Internet of Everything creates a genuine environmental paradox: the same connected systems that enable energy optimization, waste reduction, and resource conservation also require enormous amounts of energy, rare earth minerals, and manufacturing capacity to produce, power, and eventually dispose of billions of connected devices across the planet. Smart thermostats reduce heating and cooling energy consumption by learning usage patterns and optimizing temperature schedules, but the manufacture of billions of IoT sensors, their batteries, circuit boards, and plastic housings consumes significant resources and generates electronic waste that accumulates in landfills where toxic materials leach into soil and groundwater.

Data centers that process the information flowing through IoE networks consumed approximately 2% of global electricity in recent years, a figure that is rising as AI-intensive workloads increase computational demands and the volume of IoE data grows exponentially with each new category of connected device deployed. The connection between AI and climate change includes both the potential for AI-optimized energy systems to reduce emissions and the reality that training and running AI models requires substantial energy consumption that contributes to the problem it aims to solve.

The environmental case for IoE depends entirely on whether the efficiency gains enabled by connected systems exceed the environmental costs of building and operating the infrastructure those systems require. Current evidence is mixed: smart grid technologies demonstrably reduce energy waste in electrical distribution, precision agriculture powered by IoE sensors reduces water and fertilizer consumption, and smart logistics optimize transportation routes to lower fuel consumption. But the lifecycle environmental impact of manufacturing, distributing, operating, and disposing of tens of billions of connected devices has not been comprehensively assessed, and the rebound effect, where efficiency gains encourage increased consumption, could offset theoretical savings.

Reclaiming Agency in Our Digital Lives

The growing awareness of digital wellbeing challenges has spawned a movement toward intentional technology use that seeks to preserve the genuine benefits of connectivity while reducing the compulsive, attention-fragmenting patterns that undermine mental health and relationship quality. Digital wellbeing strategies recommended by researchers include screen time management through built-in device tools like iOS Screen Time and Android Digital Wellbeing, scheduled notification-free periods that protect focused attention, and deliberate choices about which connected devices genuinely improve quality of life versus which add connectivity without corresponding value.

Digital literacy programs represent an essential intervention at the societal level because they equip individuals with the critical thinking skills needed to navigate IoE environments that are designed by sophisticated engineering teams to maximize engagement rather than user benefit. Understanding how algorithmic recommendation systems work, why notification patterns are designed to trigger compulsive checking behavior, and how personal data is collected, aggregated, and monetized gives individuals the knowledge foundation they need to make genuinely informed choices about their digital engagement. Organizational policies including workplace digital wellness initiatives, screen-free meeting protocols, and after-hours communication boundaries provide structural support for healthier digital habits that individuals struggle to maintain alone against the pull of always-connected workplace cultures.

The most effective approaches to digital wellbeing combine individual awareness with structural changes to the digital environment rather than placing the entire burden of self-regulation on users operating within systems designed to undermine their self-control. Just as society does not rely solely on individual willpower to prevent gambling addiction but also regulates casino practices, meaningful progress on digital wellbeing requires regulatory frameworks that address the design patterns, business models, and data practices that drive compulsive technology use at a systemic level. The concept of fog computing and machine learning illustrates how technical infrastructure decisions affect user experience, because processing data locally rather than in distant cloud servers can reduce the latency that makes real-time engagement loops so psychologically compelling.

Where the Internet of Everything Goes from Here

The next decade will determine whether the Internet of Everything fulfills its potential to create genuine improvements in human life or whether it becomes primarily a mechanism for surveillance, commercial manipulation, and social control operating behind a facade of convenience and efficiency. The technology itself is value-neutral; connected sensors, AI analytics, and integrated systems can serve either democratic empowerment or authoritarian monitoring depending entirely on the governance structures, business models, and social norms that shape their deployment across different societies.

Emerging enabling technologies including 6G networks, quantum communication for secure data transmission, wireless power transfer for device charging, and edge AI for real-time local processing will expand IoE capabilities dramatically while creating new challenges around security, energy consumption, and equitable access that current frameworks are not prepared to address. The integration of generative AI into IoE architectures is already creating autonomous decision-making agents that can execute complex actions across connected systems without human oversight, from optimizing manufacturing processes to managing energy grids to coordinating emergency responses across city infrastructure.

The human relationship with the internet is entering a new phase where connectivity becomes so deeply embedded in the physical environment that the concept of being online or offline loses its meaning entirely. Future generations will not remember a time when they had to connect to the internet because the internet will simply be the medium through which the physical world operates, as invisible and essential as oxygen. The evolution of drone delivery systems and autonomous vehicles illustrates how IoE principles are extending from the digital world into physical space, creating environments where connected intelligence manages the movement of objects and people through algorithmic coordination rather than individual human decision-making.

The defining question of our era is not whether everything will be connected but whether we will shape that connectivity to serve human flourishing or allow it to be shaped primarily by commercial interests that treat human attention, behavior, and personal data as raw materials to be extracted and monetized. The answer depends on choices being made right now by policymakers, technology companies, educators, parents, and individuals about what kind of connected world they want to inhabit and what boundaries they are willing to establish and defend against the relentless expansion of connectivity into every remaining private, unmonitored, and uncommercial space in human life.

Key Insights

• Approximately 93% of executives agree that IoT implementation advantages outweigh associated risks, yet only 54% of enterprises deploy IoT solutions primarily for cost reduction, suggesting untapped potential in wellbeing and sustainability applications.
• Pew Research Center found that 41% of US adults report being online almost constantly, rising to 63% among adults aged 18-29, confirming that persistent connectivity has become the norm rather than the exception for most Americans.
• The OECD’s 2025 study across 14 countries found consistent associations between higher personal screen time and poorer wellbeing outcomes, including poor mental health, low life satisfaction, and diminished sense of purpose.
• Global average screen time reached six hours and forty-five minutes per day across all devices, translating to approximately 70 full days per year or 20% of waking life spent on internet-connected screens.
• IoT devices are projected to generate 79.4 zettabytes of data by 2025, and the number of connected devices worldwide is expected to climb from 22.4 billion in 2026 to 39.6 billion by 2033.
• Among US adults aged 18-29, smartphone ownership is 98% and self-reported dependency concerns reach 76%, with 36% of all Americans believing they spend too much time on their smartphones daily.
• People who spend 5+ hours daily on phones are 71% more likely to experience mental health challenges compared to those who use phones for 1 hour, and 72% of Gen Z believe their mental health would improve if apps were less addictive.

Dimension	Traditional Internet	Internet of Things	Internet of Everything
Connection Scope	People to information via browsers and apps	Devices to devices via machine-to-machine communication	People, processes, data, and things in unified ecosystem
Human Role	Active user who initiates sessions	Passive beneficiary of device automation	Integral node generating data and receiving insights
Data Flow	Primarily request-response between user and server	Mostly one-directional from sensor to cloud	Multidirectional across all pillars in real time
Intelligence Layer	Server-side processing of user requests	Basic analytics and threshold-based alerts	AI-driven predictive intelligence across connected systems
Privacy Model	User controls what they share online	Devices collect environmental data continuously	Comprehensive behavioral profiling from multiple sources
Example	Searching for a recipe on a website	Smart oven tracking internal temperature	Fridge detecting ingredients, suggesting recipes, preheating oven, alerting on dietary restrictions
Value Creation	Access to information and communication	Operational efficiency through automation	Emergent intelligence from cross-pillar integration
Primary Challenge	Information overload and misinformation	Security vulnerabilities and device interoperability	Privacy erosion, mental health, digital divide, surveillance

Real-World Examples

Barcelona Smart City – IoE-Driven Urban Transformation

Barcelona implemented one of the world’s most comprehensive smart city programs using IoE principles to optimize waste collection, street lighting, parking, water management, and public transportation across the metropolitan area. The city deployed thousands of connected sensors in waste bins, street lamps, and underground water pipes that generate continuous data streams processed by a centralized analytics platform that coordinates municipal services in real time. Smart waste bins signal when they need emptying, reducing unnecessary collection trips by 30% while preventing overflow that creates sanitation hazards in residential neighborhoods and commercial districts. The estimated annual savings from Barcelona’s smart city initiatives exceed $70 million through reduced energy consumption, optimized service delivery, and improved resource allocation across municipal departments. Critics note that the same sensor infrastructure that optimizes city services creates a comprehensive surveillance capability that raises questions about citizen privacy and government data access. Source: AIMultiple Research

OECD Digital Well-being Hub – Cross-Country Screen Time Research

The OECD partnered with Cisco to create the Digital Well-being Hub, conducting a survey of 14,611 individuals across 14 countries in February and March 2025 to examine the relationship between digital technology use and subjective wellbeing using standardized measures. The study employed the WHO-5 Well-Being Index, OECD life satisfaction measures, and eudaimonia assessments alongside detailed screen time tracking to produce the most comprehensive cross-country analysis of digital wellbeing to date. Results showed consistent associations between higher personal screen time and poorer outcomes across all three wellbeing measures, with loneliness acting as a significant mediating factor that amplifies negative effects of digital engagement. The research provides an evidence base for policy interventions targeting digital wellbeing at both individual and structural levels. The limitation is that the correlational design cannot establish whether screen time causes wellbeing declines or whether people with lower wellbeing tend to spend more time online. Source: OECD

Cisco IoE Value Index – Measuring the Economic Impact of Connected Everything

Cisco, the company that coined the Internet of Everything concept, estimated that IoE would create $19 trillion in value at stake for companies and industries over a ten-year period through improved asset utilization, employee productivity, supply chain optimization, customer experience enhancement, and innovation acceleration. The value at stake framework measured the potential economic impact of connecting people, processes, data, and things across the private and public sectors globally, providing a financial justification for IoE investment that influenced corporate technology strategy worldwide. Cisco’s analysis identified that the largest share of value would come from the private sector through operational efficiency gains and new business model creation enabled by connected intelligence. The limitation of this analysis is that it was produced by the company most commercially invested in IoE adoption and did not comprehensively account for the costs of privacy erosion, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, or mental health impacts that offset some of the projected economic benefits. Source: TechTarget

Case Studies

Smart Healthcare IoE – Remote Patient Monitoring

Healthcare systems in developed nations face unsustainable cost trajectories driven by aging populations, chronic disease prevalence, and the limitations of episodic care models that catch health deterioration only during scheduled office visits separated by weeks or months. The IoE approach to healthcare connects wearable health monitors, smart pill dispensers, electronic health records, and physician notification systems into an integrated ecosystem where patient data flows continuously from home to clinic without requiring the patient to visit a hospital for routine monitoring. A patient with diabetes wearing a continuous glucose monitor receives real-time readings that feed directly into their EHR, triggering automatic medication dispensing when levels fall below safe thresholds and notifying their physician if patterns suggest the treatment plan needs adjustment.

The measurable impact includes reduced hospital readmission rates, improved chronic disease management outcomes, and lower per-patient costs compared to traditional care models that rely on periodic in-person visits for disease monitoring and medication adjustment. The controversy centers on data ownership and privacy, as continuous health monitoring generates intimate biological data that insurance companies, employers, and data brokers have strong financial incentives to access for risk assessment and commercial purposes. No comprehensive regulatory framework currently governs how IoE health data can be collected, stored, shared, and monetized across the complex chain of devices, platforms, and service providers involved in connected healthcare delivery. Source: Future Processing

IoE and Retail – Connected Shopping Experiences

Retail operators recognized that the Internet of Everything could transform the shopping experience from a series of independent transactions into a continuous relationship between consumers, stores, and supply chains that adapts in real time to preferences, inventory, and demand patterns. Major retailers deployed IoE systems integrating RFID tags, customer tracking sensors, mobile apps, digital signage, and inventory management platforms that work together to personalize promotions, optimize shelf stocking, and reduce shrinkage across thousands of locations simultaneously. Smart shelves detect when products are running low and automatically trigger replenishment orders, while customer-facing apps deliver personalized recommendations based on purchase history, location within the store, and current promotional offerings.

The measurable impact includes reported reductions in out-of-stock incidents by up to 30%, improved customer satisfaction scores, and inventory management efficiencies that reduce carrying costs and waste from expired products. The controversy involves the extensive customer tracking and behavioral profiling that IoE retail systems require, which captures movement patterns, dwell times, purchase decisions, and even emotional responses through facial recognition and sentiment analysis technologies deployed without most customers’ awareness or explicit consent. The retail IoE case illustrates the broader tension between personalized service delivery and privacy invasion that characterizes IoE deployment across industries. Source: AIMultiple Research

Screen Time and Youth Wellbeing – The Internet Matters Index

Internet Matters, a UK-based children’s online safety organization, has tracked children’s digital wellbeing across five annual reports through 2026, providing the most sustained longitudinal assessment of how growing up with ubiquitous internet connectivity affects young people’s mental health, social development, and self-regulation capabilities. The 2026 report found that the most striking change over the tracking period is the increasing amount of time children spend online and their growing struggle to regulate this behavior independently without external support and boundary-setting from parents and caregivers.

The research documented persistent levels of online harm experienced by children, including cyberbullying, exposure to inappropriate content, and privacy violations, with no significant reduction in harm rates despite growing awareness and platform safety investments over the tracking period. The findings influenced UK government policy on online safety regulation and informed platform design guidelines aimed at reducing harmful content exposure for young users in digital environments. The limitation is that the research captures correlation rather than causation, and the rapidly evolving nature of digital platforms means that findings from one year may not apply to the next as new platforms, features, and usage patterns emerge faster than research methodologies can assess them. Source: Internet Matters

Frequently Asked Questions On Internet Of Everrything