Technology at play in more innovative ways than ever

We are living in dynamic times. The adage “nothing is permanent except change” is truer today than ever before. Technology, without doubt, has been playing a fundamental role in today’s transformative world. Every year, we witness newer forms of technology with old ones becoming obsolete faster. Some become buzzwords, some fizzle out, but the ones that change our lives for the better, stay with us. In 2017, many emerging technologies like cloud, predictive analytics, big data among others became mainstream. Let’s look at technologies I believe will further simplify and democratise technology access to you and me, create market disruption and improve business operations in 2018.

“Intelligent things” will proliferate: According to Gartner’s technology predictions for 2018, analyst David Cearley commented on the Internet of Things; saying that 2018 will be the year intelligent things proliferate, driving a “shift from stand-alone intelligent things to a swarm of collaborative intelligent things”. As the “swarms” of chattering, smart devices share increasing volumes of distributed data amongst themselves, and back into the enterprise, the challenges around integration, analytics and security will become exponentially more complex. We predict a strong market response to this need and the emergence of powerful platforms and applications that integrate, secure and enable IoT applications.

Let’s chat up with chatbots: Chatbots will be one of the key technologies that will be found on every organisation’s strategic customer experience (CX) road map in the coming year. From next year, increasingly sophisticated conversational platforms will be developed; creating chatbots that will feel completely natural to talk to replacing the currently, relatively unsophisticated interfaces. There will be a growing number of specialised “intelligent bots” that will interact and learn from each other — something all marketers, CEOs, customer service specialists need to be prepared for.

Blockchain will be the next disruption: Blockchain technology will develop more and will be used by a wider range of industries other than just for cryptocurrencies. The emergence of blockchain cloud services will help to bridge the skills gap. Using these “as a service” offerings delivered through the cloud, we will see enterprise IT teams start to develop their own cloud apps. Blockchain will find usage in any business and any industry, where there is need for a set of records to be shared across multiple trading partners, individuals or business entities like in financial services and supply chains. There will be a war: The organisations will have to wage a war for security. Infrastructure downtime, security threats and vulnerabilities, and data protection are some of the top issues that will continue to concern the top managements. CEOs will come from the cyber security space. Companies will turn to the cloud for security as they would recognise the fact that cloud provides better security than onpremise environment. As skills will continue to be scarce, security will increasingly feature AI/ML capabilities. Using machine learning and AI techniques, autonomous operations will anticipate outcomes, take remedial action, and be aware of real-time risks.

The common thread between all these trends is the application of technology in day-to-day life. Technology will continue to change how we work, consume services and live our lives. 2018 will see technology at play in more innovative ways than we ever imagined. 2018 will be a year to witness some major transformations in sectors like medicine, education or farming in India.

Companies will turn to the cloud for security as they recognise that it provides better security than on-premise environment