Just about this time last year we launched our first ever research on the Internet of Things. It was a bold move, and in order to even conduct the survey, we first had to define what we meant by the term: to ensure respondents were even answering while thinking about the same type of things we were asking about. That’s something we’ve never had to do before.

Today, I’m sitting in Newtown Square, PA, attending SAP’s annual Analyst Base Camp (we’ll have the full writeup of the show next week), and even though we’re only 90 minutes into the day and haven’t even gotten to the retail breakout, it is clear that SAP has prioritized IoT as a serious trend for their immediate future.

How quickly the world changes these days.

Sure, we hear all the time about how quickly the rate of technology and innovation are accelerating. But we’ve been hearing that for years. For me, at least, IoT might be the first time when a tech goes from a buzzword at conferences for years on end to pragmatic solutions in a truly mind-blowingly short period of time.

So as we set forward to see what you – our community – say about IoT this summer (the survey just went live), it’s worth reviewing where we were this time last year.

Firstly, we were very specific in defining IoT as collections of networked sensors that impact operations, and not consumer-facing technologies like smart refrigerators. That definition remains this year. But even with these constraints, retailers told us that IoT will have a major impact on their business and on consumer products in the next three years. 80% agreed that the Internet of Things will drastically change the way companies do business in the next 3 years.

We were even more surprised to find that retailers feel relatively prepared to meet the challenge – 66% of respondents are at least neutral if not outright optimistic about being ready to take on IoT’s impact on their operations.

However, we were most surprised to learn that their interest lies more with customer engagement and insights that drive growth than with operational improvements that save costs.

When RSR asked retailers about the business challenges causing them to look at IoT opportunities, we offered three categories of options: growth challenges, cost challenges, and margin challenges. Historically, IoT has been presented as a solution for cost challenges – in preventive maintenance scenarios, for example. However, retailers firmly reject the challenges related to cost or margin in favor of the challenges related to growth – specifically, responding to consumer challenges that might hinder growth

At the top of the list were very classic business challenges faced by retailers at least since the Great Recession: differentiating from the competition and consumer price sensitivity. We found that the kinds of challenges retailers typically struggle with during omni-channel transformation fell low on the list, including understanding what consumers want in a customer experience, and consumer dissatisfaction caused by a lack of integration across selling channels. Also very low on the list were supply chain disruptions – a common theme used in some IoT use cases. For retailers, IoT is about satisfying customers, not about moving product.

We also learned that inventory management in stores – an RFID play – is an early winner, and not just with fashion retailers, and that even though retailers see a long road ahead to actually gaining the benefits of IoT projects, they are looking for benefits related to some of the most challenging – and exciting – aspects of IoT: real-time sensing and responding to changes, customer interaction, and customer service.

So here’s the question: how has any (if not all) of this changed? And as retailers are still trying to make sense of mobile smartphones 6 years after their widespread popularity, social media nearly a decade after its, is IoT really on track to be a tech that goes from buzzword to real-world solutions in the shortest time frame yet? We’d love to have your thoughts, and if you have an extra 10 minutes, invite you to weigh in here.