With cheaper and longer-range sensors we can create vast sets of data on a scale that we haven't seen before, and with machine learning we can extract useful information from this data. With that premise it's also not hard to see why IoT in the consumer market is not such a big success, but you see big industrial players pour billions into IoT projects [1].
There's some other concerns of course too, like the impact that all this data might have on society and that the state of IoT security reflects the state of web security around 1999. If you're interested in that, I did a talk about the subject last week at the AMSxTech conference (20 minutes) [2].
[1] http://tech.newstatesman.com/iot/general-electric-billion-do... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxwWmgbRxwU&t=7s