Overview:
While you might be fascinated by AI yet couldn’t care much for blockchain, both can be applicable to making your business fit and future-ready going forward.
Beyond the peripheral and relatively minor apps and other small innovations companies might produce lie bigger trends carried by decidedly disruptive technologies. Together, they will form the arsenal of any company hoping for a successful future.
Indeed, they already are.
All these trends inform the working lives of IT companies like Mustard IT. AI’s prominence continues to rise, and as companies realize the giant leap forward they can make on the back of its predictive and other intelligence, blockchain too is falling seamlessly into place as a solution to many companies’ need for accuracy and control in often remote operations.
Here’s a list of six tech trends that are more than noteworthy for any business heading into 2022.
They’ll be the basic toolbox for successful business in the near future, and the dividing line between those who ‘have it’ and those who don’t is already being drawn across today’s marketplaces.
The Big 6 to watch in 2022
AI and Machine Learning
Top of the list must come AI and Machine Learning.
Still in its infancy, AI is already sketching the most entertaining and exhilarating stories in our work and play. Marketing hype accompanies every innovation, but the difference with AI is that it’s actually producing the goods.
Moreover, it’s a genuine unknown.
For the first time in our history, we’ve created an intelligence or intelligent behaviour that is ludicrously faster and more voluminous than our own. The AI market is predicted to reach $190 billion by 2025, rocketing from 2021’s comparatively humble $57 billion. Able to deep dive the potent underlying realities that carry huge value for business at large, AI is far and away the most dramatic commercial input in a long, long time.
Able to perform analysis in near real time, AI can detect most potently the fluctuations in customer behaviour-something already proving a massive leg up for businesses employing it. Machine Learning is a subset of AI, and in the future – no matter what kind of business you are – don’t hesitate to hire a robot monitoring expert, or an automation specialist, or even a data scientist.
You’re going to need them.
The IoT and Edge Computing
The IoT and Edge Computing are a tandem phenomenon. Cloud computing is passé. Edge computing is the new watchword.
Data is becoming more and more copious, something that’s likely still modest by future standards-it’s going to get a lot worse, when “total data management” is the aim (and a real possibility once the IoT rolls out). The cloud shows latency at times, at least for the purposes of some businesses, and possibly many. Edge computing is geared up to resolve this by operating “on the edge”, acting like one or many small datacenters, enabling remote and time-sensitive data to be swiftly processed.
A market already worth billions, that kind of money wouldn’t be there if there was no legitimate gain.
Quantum Computing
Going one step further down the rabbit hole you’ll find Quantum Computing.
For many still a “Huh?” kind of thing, quantum computing trades on quantum mechanical realities like “entanglement” and the “superposition” of quantum particles. What it all adds up to is a method of super scientific computing with the ability to make even the biggest supercomputer of today look positively dumb by comparison.
Still expensive to build and the province of intensive research, watch this space. Quantum PCs may very well populate offices and suburban homes in a decade or two the way PCs first took hold on society decades ago.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
If you’ve been struggling with terminology to describe the marriage of AI and robotics, you’re not alone. The term Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is what you’re looking for.
Although factory managers can talk quite mechanically about “automation” and “robots”, RPA is software that deals with more white-collar tasks like answering emails, sorting applications, and transaction processing.
Like it or not, RPA will certainly eliminate millions of jobs, so change is afoot. The good news is that thousands of categories that describe boring, repetitive work will be eliminated by RPA. The less great news is that many millions of people will need to upskill into something else, some halfway through their working life, and they’re often severely stressed by the idea. By knowledgeable estimates, only some 5 percent of jobs will be fully automated by RPA, so there’ll likely be a more modest shift into diversified skills, as opposed to the wholesale elimination of job categories. Jobs will likely morph rather than disappear.
Blockchain
Blockchain. Have you heard about it?
Unless you’ve been living in a cave in the hills for the last decade, you have, and its promise is unfolding in a myriad of ways across the global marketplace. Perhaps most usefully for business, private blockchains have eliminated many data capture and reporting hassles for global business especially, while also bringing detailed tracking and analysis to processes. Equally importantly, blockchain often simply presents a better and cheaper way to do things, while simultaneously upping accuracy and efficiency within an organization.
5G
Finally, 5G is an unstoppable global force that’s set to bring the reality of the IoT not just to our doors, but right into our homes and workspaces.
Technologies like AR and VR will finally manifest as imagined with 5G and become the daily tools business has long anticipated. While Smart Cities and other modern design ideas rely on 5G to reach their full potential, many public services and safety needs will also get a boost from 5G’s rollout across the globe.
A few dozen companies are legitimately poised to implement, being able to build the infrastructure required, and also forming the interface where the literally billions of devices anticipated will be able to communicate across the public and private divide.