Happy New Year. Following on from the last Trend Alert in 2017 that focused on computing, Athena finds that technological change dominates pundits and experts’ forecasts for 2018. Read on to discover where they see what’s coming next and join the party or take mitigating action before its too late.
- year
- 2018 will be the year that Artificial Intelligence comes of age in cybersecurity terms.
- Next year, AI will increasingly be seen as a force for good in business.
- 2018 will be the year when businesses and technology providers intensify their focus on IoT security.
- 2018 will be the year where the tremendous innovation and promise of blockchain must become real.
- 2018 will be a year when new consumer (vehicle, home, wearables, entertainment) devices take off and industrial use cases thrive where automation, measurement, control and management create new economic benefit.
- 2018 will likely be a year of reflection and refocusing for AR and VR.
- Crypto in 2018 will be the year history will remember as the year it has reached the mainstream population.
- 2018 could be the year when Amazon becomes truly unstoppable-or gets cut down to size.
- 2018 will be the year in which organizations deliver a step-change in their cybersecurity capability by embracing emerging technologies.
- 2018 is going to be the biggest year ever in terms of plug-in battery demand.
- The coming year will undoubtedly bring further growth in the number of connected devices and enterprise IoT projects.
- Consolidation across several healthcare sectors is creating unique opportunities for health IT that will be fleshed out even further in the coming year.
- Using fiat money will decrease more and more in the coming years.
- 2018 will be a major year for platform businesses.
- spending
- Global enterprise security spending will reach $96.3 billion in 2018.
- Information security spending was projected to reach more than $86 billion in 2017, and Gartner predicts another hike to $93 billion in 2018.
- 2018 cybersecurity spending is expected to reach $93 billion.
- company
- About one-fourth of companies expect to depend on AI making real-time decisions in 2018 as well as instructing supplies and employees.
- 2018 will see more companies across different industries leveraging simulation and digital twins to speed up product development and engineering.
- Chinese companies will hardly narrow gaps of two to three years with Korean semiconductor companies for the time being as the semiconductor industry has very high barriers in terms of technology and investment.
- Gaps between Chinese semiconductor companies and global makers such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will remain wide in terms of yield rates and performance.
- scenario
- artificial intelligence
- 2018 will be the year that Artificial Intelligence comes of age in cybersecurity terms.
- 2018 shows 46% of college graduates find Artificial intelligence as the next generation technology where technology leaders are drumming up the thought that the emergence of new technology such as AI and Robotics are going to be the new drivers of employment.
- digital twin
- 2018 will see more companies across different industries leveraging simulation and digital twins to speed up product development and engineering.
- Many industry experts suspect that there will be a quantitative shift towards increasing the functions of simulation within the Digital Twin in 2018.
- enterprise iot project
- In 2018 enterprise IoT projects will finally move beyond merely automating existing business processes.
- The coming year will undoubtedly bring further growth in the number of connected devices and enterprise IoT projects.
- ai
- In 2018, AI will become critical in IT's ability to master increasing IT complexity in order to deliver on consumer demands.
- AI in 2018 will bring SEO-voice activation.
- In 2018 AI will allow retailers to understand customers' preferences as well as their five closest friends do.
- Next year, AI will increasingly be seen as a force for good in business.
- 2018 will see the fog of hype clear and the C-suite demand a more demonstrable return on investment from AI.
- About one-fourth of companies expect to depend on AI making real-time decisions in 2018 as well as instructing supplies and employees.
- 2018 will see AI continue to dominate media.
- AI will not stand out in 2018.
- IT employees in 2018 will spend even less time with discrete hardware and more time managing virtual environments due to AI.
- 2018 shows 46% of college graduates find Artificial intelligence as the next generation technology where technology leaders are drumming up the thought that the emergence of new technology such as AI and Robotics are going to be the new drivers of employment.
- content
- Interactive visual content, chatbots, storytelling and increased personalization will dominate the content marketing scene in 2018.
- Visual content will account for 82 percent of all internet consumer traffic by 2021.
- production
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment towards new technologies is neutral but the latest batch of year-end predictions contained many expressing long held fears about where AI, sensors, robots and computing may lead to in the future. We are likely to see a return to neutral sentiment in the months ahead judging by past years’ analysis.
Metrics
The changes above are likely to be adopted into generally accepted practice from 2029 onwards.
Topic map
We recommend you further explore the topics forecasts below at Shaping Tomorrow to gain further foresight on how emerging technologies may impact your organization in the future.
Heat map
Emerging technologies will be most felt in North America, China, India and Australia in 2018.
Year-on-year
Work on emerging technologies has moved to centre stage in the last year for almost every sector. If your not digitizing your competitors are!
Radar chart
This new graphic shows that Education, Transport, Healthcare and Real Estate are the sectors most likely to witness disruption by emerging technologies in the next year. They may not be high in the previous chart but they are ripe for the greatest transformation and disruption.
Graphit
The key topic areas highlight the development of new technologies which will cause the revaluation and resetting of business models, strategies and policies from most organizations in 2018 and beyond. In fact, Athena’s analysis of the biggest mega-trends right now shows re-organization is number one which is not on most observers lists!
We recommend you explore the topics in more detail at Shaping Tomorrow to mitigate threats to your organization and to seize upcoming opportunities.
a) Emerging topics
b) Most affected sectors
By 2020 we can expect to see the most disruptive computing changes in construction (smart cities, transport and materials), retail (Amazon), and the security sectors (cybersecurity).
