May 18, 2015
If you keep up with wearable technology news, you most certainly have come across or seen referenced a number of reports & studies by the likes of Salesforce, Tractica, Accenture, and Juniper Research. We decided to compile a list of these organizations’ most interesting findings relating to the adoption of wearables in business. Check ‘em out!
1. Tractica forecasts that enterprise & industrial use cases (and especially corporate wellness programs) will drive the deployment of more than 75 million wearable devices between 2014 and 2020. Tractica also predicts that smartwatches will beat out fitness trackers & smartglasses as the most popular workplace wearable.
2. According to Salesforce, use of wearables in the enterprise – to access customer data in real time, view business analytics, create immersive customer experiences, etc. – will more than triple in the next 2 years.
3. 79% of adopters (out of 500 business professionals surveyed by Salesforce) agree that wearables “are or will be strategic to their company’s future success;” 76% reported improvements in business performance after implementing wearable devices; and 86% said they plan to increase wearable technology spending over the next 12 months.
4. 49% of adopters expect smartwatches to have the biggest impact, and 40% believe smartwatches will have the quickest adoption rate in the enterprise. 62% are currently using, piloting or planning to use smartwatches in the next 2 years. (Salesforce)
5. 51% of technology & business leaders identified wearables as a critical, high, or moderate priority for their organization over the next 12 months. (Forrester)
6. Companies are embracing BYOW: 54% of business professionals & wearable tech adopters surveyed by Salesforce reported that they currently support a BYOW model, while an additional 40% said they plan to support BYOW in the future.
7. According to Forrester, adoption of wearables in enterprise will happen over a decade, with piloting & early adoption occurring now, from 2015 to 2016; developer ecosystems around wearable devices maturing by 2017; mainstreaming happening between 2017 and 2019; and wearables becoming commonplace among employees at many enterprises by as early as 2020 and as late as 2024.
8. 42% of full- and part-time workers who use a mobile device for work (out of 3,500 questioned by MobileIron) said they plan to purchase a wearable like the Apple Watch; 95% intend to use their smartwatch for work tasks.
9. 70% of (1,000) consumers surveyed by PwC said they would use wearables provided by their employer and permit anonymous streaming of the collected data to a pool in exchange for a break on their insurance premiums.
10. 77% of respondents believe wearable devices can boost efficiency & productivity at work; 70% said they expect their employer to permit the use of wearables on the job; and 46% said they think their company should fund the wearable technology (as opposed to a BYOD policy). (PwC)
11. WT can boost employees’ productivity & lift job satisfaction: The Human Cloud at Work study led by Dr. Chris Brauer of the Institute of Management Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London (the study was a collaboration between Rackspace and Goldsmiths) found that employees on average were 8.5% more productive when using wearable tech, and their job satisfaction went up 3.5% as a result.
12. Only 8% of adopters said that they are completely ready to gain actionable insights from the volume of employee & customer data generated from wearables; nevertheless, it is acknowledged that wearables-generated data will be an enterprise game-changer, helping businesses to make more informed decisions in real time. (Salesforce)
13. 30% of adopters cited the lack of business applications as a primary challenge in implementing wearable tech. Among those respondents who indicated they have yet to adopt wearables, 25% said they would be motivated by lower costs and 15% by devices that multitask. As the app ecosystem grows & new hardware enables more complex business scenarios, the number of companies embracing wearables will surely increase, and dramatically. (Salesforce)
14. 81% of 2,400 CIOs surveyed by Robert Half Technology believe wearable computing devices will become common workplace tools, although only 5% said they can see widespread adoption happening in the next year. 37% predict wearables will happen in the workplace within the next 3-5 years, while 24% believe the revolution is more than 5 years away, and 16% believe wearable tech will never be commonly used in the workplace.
15. ABI Research estimates that at least 3 million wearable activity-tracking devices will be integrated into employee wellness programs or schemes by 2018.
16. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of (200) insurance executives surveyed by Accenture expect wearables to be broadly adopted by the insurance industry within the next 2 years, while nearly one-third (31%) of insurers said they are already using wearable tech to engage customers, employeers, or partners.
17. New findings from Juniper Research show that Augmented Reality (AR) technology used in the enterprise will drive annual app revenues of 2.4 billion in 2019—a tenfold increase from 2014. Juniper predicts that enterprise head-mounted devices or HMDs like Vuzix’s M100 & Daqri’s Smart Helmet will overtake smartphones & tablets as the preferred AR device after 2019.
