2019 Technology Trends

Happy New Year!

The year 2018 will not easily be forgotten in the Technology industry, it’s a year that has been marked with positives and a lot of negatives. Remember the CRISPR babies scandal in China, the Cambridge Analytica revelations, GDPR and how the tech giants took up to defending their data collection methods and further the mass adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation in all European Member States from 25 May 2018. 

Notwithstanding, 2018 was the year we had the first trillion dollar company in the tech industry - Apple and Amazon (this feat has been achieved by PetroChina and SaudiAramco in the past). Thanks to Apple for delivering not just a phone but a luxury device while Amazon also hit the trillion dollar mark having captured close to 50% of the US ecommerce market. 

2018 was also a year when Artificial Intelligence was embraced by businesses. AI powered products has moved from the research lab into the markets, we have seen a lot more on AI powered Chatbots than we have seen before. Facebook’s CEO (Mark Zuckerberg) declared at F8 conference that there were now over 300k bots on the platform and LEO (UBA’s Chatbanking Bot) was doing great stuff. We did say that WhatsApp will release their Business APIs and they did in August 2018. Many organisations have jumped at this and started to develop new bots on the platform. Banks in Nigeria are betting on this and UBA’s LEO is in the forefront.

But what should we expect in 2019?

The 2019 Technology Trend Prediction

Industry researchers and watchers have come out with predictions for 2019 and I do agree with some of them. Below are the key trends I see for 2019:

 Trend No 1: Artificial Intelligence

Again for the second consecutive year, I do believe AI will be leading the top technology trend for 2019. AI-led automation will be transforming company processes and delivering new customer experience. From Amazon Echo powered Microwave Oven to self-driving cars, to digital assistants, AI will be impacting just everything technology in this year.

 Trend No 2: Blockchain

A distributed ledger system expected to have an “Internet invention” kind of impact on businesses. Many have mistook this to mean Crypto currencies and as the major Cryptos lost their values in 2018, some people think this is the end of Blockchain. Far from it! Cryptos run on Blockchain technology but there are far much more that the technology has to offer than cryptos.

Gartner has estimated that blockchain will create $3.1T in business value by 2030.  Many more financial organisations and International Money Transfer Organisations(IMTOs) will embrace blockchain. This is going to disrupt international and regional money transfers.

 Trend No 3: Quantum Computing

The rate of automation and technology innovation is directly proportional to the computing power available. “Quantum computers are an exponentially scalable and highly parallel computing model. A way to imagine the difference between traditional and quantum computers is to imagine a giant library of books. While a classic computer would read every book in a library in a linear fashion, a quantum computer would read all the books simultaneously. Quantum computers are able to theoretically work on millions of computations at once. Quantum computing in the form of a commercially available, affordable and reliable service would transform some industries.” [Extracted from Gartner’s Top Ten Tech Trends for 2019].

While this will not be full blown in 2019, a lot more progress will be made on this technology that will improve machine learning and major research capabilities especially in medicine.

Trend No 4: 5G Cellular Network

In 2019, there will be a transition from 4G to 5G cellular networks. This transition will affect many devices and other machines like industrial robots, drones and security cameras. It will not be like the transition from 3G to 4G. This will be a major leap. It will offer mobile internet speeds that could allow an entire movie to be downloaded in seconds. Yes, I mean in SECONDS. Imagine that! The US and China government already sees this network as a competitive edge. Although, many of the existing mobile devices will not support 5G, users will have to buy new phones while operators will have to do major upgrades to deliver this value.

In Conclusion

The year 2019 hold a lot more than we can imagine now. But the above will surely shape the direction of things this year and we need to start putting close attention. I will be open to get more contributions on this.