2018 has witnessed disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and allied technologies dominate the tech world and business revenues. These disruptive technologies from enhanced artificial intelligence accessibility, to the rise of augmented and virtual reality, contribute massively to game-changing ideas that are ready to bring a ground-breaking change in the way business enterprises function. This year, we will see these trendy technologies dictate how business function and what new products and services will be offered to the customers in the near future. Here is a list of the technology trends that will disrupt and reshape business enterprises in 2018.
1. Citizen AI: Artificial Intelligence to Welfare Business & Society
Artificial intelligence (AI) is much more than a trendy tech tool. AI systems impact people and their daily lives. It is AI guiding the voice-controlled Alexa and Siri to navigating uncharted territories with automobile navigation technologies. Interestingly, some of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence trends are up for grabs that are developed on a personal computer on open source frameworks. The applicability of AI to welfare society is fast reaching to its pinnacle. Call it intelligent assistants, telemedicine, AI automation or talking ads, examples of raising AI to benefit business and society are widespread.
2. Augmented Reality
Haven’t you have rolled out laughing at the innovative filters of Snap chat, that’s augmented reality to the forefront for you! Recently Apple introduced ARKit to make it easier for developers to integrate augmented reality into their iPhone apps. Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2019, VR, augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (which is a combination of the two) will be deployed by 20% of the large business houses.
In a recent MIT survey of nearly 300 companies conducted to analyze what makes a great employee experience, researchers found investments in video technology lead to innovation, as well as improved collaboration and productivity. In the times to come, video tech will continue to simulate and improve face-to-face communication armed with new features, like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality to redefine communication and entertainment.
3. The Internet of Things
The era of the Internet of Things (IoT) has finally arrived. Organisations taking IoT seriously are committing their investments into the IoT Technology via robotics, AI, and immersive experiences. However, exploiting the IoT opportunity will take proper planning and investment from the business enterprises. Organisations will need a strategy to identify quick wins in the IoT space, bringing these intelligent environments to life with IoT will require adding requisite skillsets and workforce capabilities. This will also require modernizing the current enterprise technology infrastructures. Another concern for IoT adoption will be strengthening security parameters to offer intelligent business solutions.
4. Cloud Technology
Increasing workloads have led to an intelligent and automatic allocation of the tasks into the cloud computing networks which are essentially a blessing for the modern business. Organisations have begun to adopt an autonomic, economic-based intelligence process to manage multi-cloud environments. Hybrid cloud computing is the next move in cloud technology that allows workloads to be switched seamlessly between cloud environments, whether public or private, depending on the organizational requirements. 2018 will bring additional pressures to cloud computing as a business enterprise’s private and public clouds come from separate vendors operating in different cloud environments. These different cloud environments are bundled with their own management tools and interfaces adding extra complexities to the existing potent mix of challenges.
5. Cyber Security
Organisations rely on data to run the business; this dependence is making enterprises exposed to a new kind of vulnerability. This vulnerability involves inaccurate, manipulated, and biased data that may give skewed decisions and also run to increasing costs. To address this challenge, enterprises must be ready to address the dual concerns arising out of data veracity and data manipulation or biases concerns. With increasing dependence on data and cloud computing cyber-attacks are becoming common and an expensive deal. No organization size, type or industry is immune from this danger. As per the latest UK government Cyber Security Breaches survey, more than 75% of British businesses enterprises have experienced a cybersecurity breach or attack in 2017. Astounding isn’t it? 2018 will be the year of protecting the enterprise data. The coming months will see new improvements in cybersecurity. Massive investments are been deployed in security technology to help organizations defend against and detect potential attacks.
6. Machine Learning
Machine learning will be the buzzword behind the technology innovations in 2018. In the times to come, Machine learning will be a key driver of revenues and value addition to enterprises. This trendy technology will contribute in mammoth capacities particularly in the area of security, retail and healthcare. Machine learning is developing path-breaking healthcare solutions and delivering more sophisticated security analysis.
2018 will see a wider adoption of software solutions that enable the organization to conduct anomaly analysis using machine learning algorithms. This will see behavioral analytics applied to network activity for better online recommendations, personalized healthcare solutions and fastest route suggestions on digital maps.
7. Voice-Controlled Chatbots
Chatbots have redefined the way business enterprises interact with their customers. Customised chatbots interact with customers in healthcare, retail and e-commerce platforms. Chatbots is an emerging trend that will continue to rise as workers who grew up with voice control integrated with cloud computing enter the workforce. To stay ahead in today’s dynamic business setting; the need of the hour is to arm the business enterprises with trainable digital assistant technologies. The greatest advantage of the trendy digital assistant technologies is that they are smart, predictive, have the capability to learn, and can quickly adapt to the new and challenging environments. In the short term, we will witness voice-controlled assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and Microsoft’s Cortana helping to increase productivity and improve the work-life balance.
8. Blockchain
Gone are the days where blockchain was restricted to the financial services sector. The year 2018 will witness blockchain technology spread its wings in domains like improving the supply chain and addressing security blockchain algorithms and will command a disruptive influence in modern commerce, healthcare, retail, the public sector and other areas.
The influence of blockchain technology will, however, be felt the maximum in the finance departments of business enterprises which are all set for a distributed ledger technology revolution. Blockchain the technology behind the distributed ledger will deploy everything from reconciliation and cash application to invoice matching over a consensually shared and synchronized network spread across multiple sites, institutions and geographies for a universal access, just the way core banking functions.
