How the biggest tech trends to watch for in 2022

We’ll get our first clues at this week’s CES electronics show in Las Vegas — a sprawling event that offers an exclusive glimpse at the tech that could help shape the year. (That is, unless the high transmissibility of the omicron variant of the coronavirus forces organizers to shutter the show. Big-name attendees including Intel, Meta and Amazon have pulled out, and show organizers have shortened the event by one day — it now runs Wednesday through Friday.)Before the show and the rest of the year kick off in earnest, we wanted to break out our crystal ball to suss out what the new year will mean for the tech in your life. Some of the developments we’ll discuss are long overdue. Some build on progress or change we saw in 2021.In many ways, 2022 will be a year of “hurry up and wait,” Carolina Milanesi, a technology analyst with research firm Creative Strategies, told us. Big tech developments like “the metaverse,” autonomous vehicles and greater repairability will take time to catch up to their hype, and companies must be careful not to overpromise, Milanesi said.

At the same time, companies need our buy-in more than ever. Smart home technology, health wearables and virtual reality all depend on our personal data to improve. If we don’t trust companiesenough to share a whole lot of it, that technology gets stuck in the “my voice assistant still doesn’t understand me” phase.

Here’s what we expect — and in some cases, hope — to see in 2022.

Business and consumer landscapes have evolved considerably over the last two years, especially in the way consumers interact with businesses to how organisations manage operations and deliver value in today’s remote environment. The acceleration in the adoption of digital technologies is a result of increased demand by businesses prioritising streamlined operations, achieving a better speed to market, and ensuring a seamless digital experience for customers.

While 2021 was all about technological breakthroughs primarily aimed to serve communities and give companies a leg up against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, it is expected that 2022 will be the year of invention and re-innovation.

According to Gartner estimates, worldwide IT spending is projected to grow to $4.5 trillion in 2022, which is a 5.5% increase from 2021, and also said to be the highest Y0Y growth in the last decade.

In 2022, an accelerated rate of digitisation and virtualisation of business and society seems inevitable and as this continues to gain momentum, here are some top trends that industry experts say will influence the way products are built and consumed and will define future-ready organisations of tomorrow.

Governments and public authorities are no more immune to disruption from the advance of technology than any other part of society. Many of the challenges facing public bodies today stem from the fight to tackle the global Covid-19 pandemic. Often, government institutions found that by adopting similar tactics and strategies to industry and the private sector, they too could learn to become more flexible and agile in their response.

This has meant that they also have experienced an accelerated rate of digital transformation. Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), and digital twins are now firmly on the agenda of governments and public bodies, whereas previously, they might just have been on the roadmap. Many governments, particularly in more developed nations, have discovered they simply can’t afford to be complacent when there is the chance to drive so much positive change.