Current challenges in environmental science, medicine, food chemistry as well as the emerging use of artificial intelligence for solving problems in these fields require distributed, local sensing. Such ubiquitous sensing requires components with 1) high sensitivity, 2) power efficiency, 3) miniaturizability, and 4) the ability to directly interface with electronic circuitry, i.e., electronic readout of sensing signals. Over the recent years, several nanoparticle-based approaches have found their way into this field and have demonstrated high performance. However, challenges remain, such as the toxicity of many of today's narrow bandgap semiconductors for NIR detection and the high energy consumption as well as low selectivity of state-of-the-art commercialized gas sensors. With their unique light-matter interaction and ink-based fabrication schemes, plasmonic nanostructures provide potential technological solutions to these challenges, leading also to better environmental performance. In this perspective recent approaches of using plasmonic nanoparticles are discussed for the fabrication of NIR photodetectors and light-activated, energy-efficient gas sensing devices. In addition, new strategies implying computational approaches are pointed out for miniaturizable spectrometers, exploiting the wide spectral tunability of plasmonic nanocomposites, and for selective gas sensors, utilizing dynamic light activation. The benefits of colloidal approaches for device fabrication are discussed with regard to technological advantages and environmental aspects, which are barely considered so far.