I expect this year to refine our expectations about technology, challenging all our previously held assumptions and creating new pathways to the future. Here are some trends that will most likely dominated world.
Last year offered us an opportunity to rethink, reshape, and re-strategise. The way we live, and work has fundamentally been altered. In what was a pivotal year, more companies realised that technology must form the bulwark of their business. Innovation must go together with flexibility and adaptability in this COVID-dominated world.
I expect this year to refine our expectations about technology, challenging all our previously held assumptions and creating new pathways to the future. Here are some trends that will most likely dominate.
Insights-led companies will increase their chances to beat the competition
The use of AI-powered real-time systems is expected to grow by 20 percent in 2022, removing the latency between insight, decision, and results: Forrester Research.
What does that tell us? That this year, obtaining meaningful insights will be more critical than ever before. But--and this is not a small but--obtaining data insights will get tougher with data deprecation and opaque AI. Brands that collect zero-party data will double in 2022.
I believe that businesses that focus on ensuring a seamless flow of insights between the different layers of marketing, support, or product will do very well this year. If you don’t have a Chief Data Officer, I suggest adding one soon to your organisation. Moving even beyond this year, Gartner expects more than a third of large organisations to have analysts who practise decision intelligence, including decision modeling.
Tactical automation is table stakes; 5% of Fortune 500 firms will focus on extreme automation
As much as 15 percent of automation COEs will broaden their scope to include AI-led initiatives in 2022?: Forrester Research.
Over this year, I expect more Chief Automation Officers to be appointed, who would move from the current tactical view of automation to a more strategic and business-oriented view.
Hyper-automation has rapidly changed from a nice-have to a must-have because of this pandemic’s enforced push to digital businesses.
Gartner expects hyperautomation to be a top trend for 2022 as well. The research firm had made the term one of its top concepts last year. Research from the company values the hyper-automation market to exceed $596 billion in 2022.
Hyper-automation will gain prominence. It’s to be expected from a digital native organisation. And it will stay for a while to come, even beyond 2022, because while data-driven automation is disruptive, it is certainly not a speedy process.
The multi-trillion-dollar metaverse market is here
Over the coming decades, I expect the metaverse to become a multi-trillion-dollar industry, a powerhouse of the global economy. Facebook, or Meta as it’s known now, has said that it would invest more than $10 billion for its vision of metaverse. More businesses will join in this year.
As utopian as the concept of metaverse sounds, it only serves to establish what is increasingly our reality: a hyper-connected augmented environment spread globally powered by the incredible power of AI. It is expected that large companies will soon introduce bias bounties to improve their AI models. I would call this concept somewhat similar to the bug bounties of yore. In CX, companies will be looking to the metaverse to deliver new, exciting customer experiences, especially given how well the metaverse integrates with virtual and augmented reality.
Forrester Research estimates more than 5 deployments of enterprise metaverse in 2022. We have seen glimpses of that through Ikea’s Everyday Experiments and Snapchat’s AR Lab. This year will immerse us more in this new world.
I can’t wait for that new world to unfold.
Tech debt will worsen in the face of rapid tech acceleration
Yes, the pandemic accelerated large-scale digital transformation and drove phenomenal growth in technology businesses. But as more and more companies seek to modernise, what’s becoming apparent is that tech debt could offset all the gains from that process. This tech debt can stifle innovation, resulting in a more prolonged impact on revenue.
Organisations must quickly establish a way to move away from legacy tech and develop adaptive technology that can match the pace of transformation. Prioritising the speed of IT modernisation over maintainability will inflate tech debts. To cope with this, I expect more businesses to utilise low-code or no-code, cloud-first, and platform-based tools to pay off the technical debt.
Half of enterprise organisations will adopt cloud-native and containers
Cloud truly matured in 2021. We saw an increase in the use of server-less from 26 percent in 2020 to 32 percent in 2021. Gartner estimates that by 2025, cloud-native platforms will act as the foundation for more than 95 percent of digital initiatives. That’s a dramatic increase when you consider that it was less than 40 percent in 2021.
One of the key things you will notice this year in cloud will be the use of industry clouds. Industry clouds are of particular interest to me because they have the extraordinary potential to create business value. With industry clouds, companies can not only accelerate the pace of cloud migration but also directly influence business outcomes. Expect many organisations to adopt micro services, server-less technologies, essentially making cloud-native architectures as mainstream.
As cybersecurity concerns loom, adoption of privacy-preserving technologies will double
Decentralised digital identity (DDID) will become a reality in three industries: Forrester Research.
Is DDID another passing buzzword? No. Forrester believes that this emerging model of DIDD will go on to replace the models that exist today. DDID adoption has been slow. But I think this year will be when businesses should prepare for the rapid adoption of DIDD and its potential for disruptive impact.
The year 2021 was quite a wild one for the cybersecurity space. CIOs must avoid any loss of trust from a privacy breach. Privacy-enhancing computation techniques, therefore, will gather momentum this year. That’s why Gartner expects 60% of large organizations to use one or more privacy-enhancing computation techniques by 2025. Also, organisations that adopt a cybersecurity mesh architecture will achieve a significant reduction in the financial impact of security incidents.
ESG values will dictate buying decisions in 2022, and enterprises will be forced to listen
Companies can only ignore ESG values at their peril. Forrester estimates the number of companies committed to The Climate Pledge to triple.
The market for responsible AI solutions, it adds, which are built on values such as fairness and transparency, will double this year. And AI can help ESG in many other ways as well. AI, automation, and technology will allow companies to gather and analyze large volumes of ESG data and enable leaders to make more informed decisions.
I also expect the S in ESG, namely the social impact, to gain increased traction this year. Customers will increasingly assess how their brands are dealing with community development or sustainability or measuring D&I metrics.
So, from insights to experiences, from data privacy to cybersecurity mesh, from tech debt to cloud-native, we have what promises to be one of the most exciting years in technology.
-- The author, Ajay Tyagi, is Executive Vice-President, CSS Corp. The views expressed here are personal.
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