5 tech trends to keep an eye on today and tomorrow

So far in 2023, new technologies have captured the public interest like never before. The explosion of tools like ChatGPT has got people far outside industry circles talking about the potential of Generative AI. Wherever you go right now, it doesn’t take long to hear opinions on these new frontiers of tech being shared freely. And it’s only one of the bevy of emerging tech trends poised to shape the world around us.

At the start of the year, we asked five of our experts to tell us what they think you’ll be hearing more about over the rest of the year. Let’s recap their insights to see what we can learn about today’s emerging tech trends.

Digital Twins Gaining Traction Across Verticals

By Joe Dunleavy , our Head of Innovation?

In 2022 we saw an increase in client adoption of Digital Twins (DT), as well as large cloud players adding richer DT functionality to their platforms. I expect this momentum to continue in 2023. ?

Using DT allows companies to run hypothesis testing in a digital environment, this way gaining insight into potential savings they can achieve – instead of having to bear the cost of experimenting in the real world. Let’s take the example of a logistics company that uses DTs to adjust and optimise their fulfilment processes or the road routes used for their final mile deliveries. Testing options in a DT-enabled environment allows them to understand better the impact of the changes they consider making. Besides efficiency goals, they can also get insights into factors such as carbon emissions. (One opportunity I find particularly fascinating is leveraging DT to support the green agenda in ways like this.) ?

I see DT playing an increasingly important role across various industries, including logistics, manufacturing and retail, but also in event planning by, for instance, helping crowd management. There may be quite a bit of effort to build your DT environment initially, but its longer-term value through insights gained will outweigh the initial upfront investment. ?

Technologies Leading to the Metaverse?

By Thomas Bedenk , our VP of Extended Reality?

Last year’s metaverse hype brought topics like VR, AR, Gaming, AI, Web3 and NFTs to top executives’ agendas. The next step will be the enterprise and industry implementations of these in line with business goals. In 2023 I expect to see more focused efforts to map out and identify the right KPIs to guide and measure these efforts – even when they are not connected to direct revenue but to customer engagement or future readiness goals.??

I believe games will remain playing a massive role in establishing fundamental experiential differences in this new medium. Generative AI will emerge not only to improve efficiency in commercial productions but make a whole new kind of user-generated content possible. At the same time, major technology players will continue investing in positioning themselves for the next-generation spatial web.?

While the metaverse still doesn’t exist, many indicators predict it’ll be the future of the internet. So, my advice is to be open and invest in further exploring the potential of these developments – in an accelerated way, backed by a strategy rather than with one-off projects. I expect XR and real-time 3D technologies will see strong growth across a variety of industries, including logistics (via digital twins), automotive (via improving designing, production and marketing) and retail (via enhancing the buying experience).?

Text and Image Generation. And more to come.?

By Radu Orghidan , our VP of Cognitive Computing?

In 2022, the democratisation of AI became a reality and took over news headlines worldwide. Generative AI, enabled by transformer models, grew into hype recently fuelled by Stable Diffusion and chatGPT. Huge models, accessible as AI platforms, already impact various areas, including text, image, audio, video, code, chatbots, semantic search, gaming and data engineering.??

The semantic search capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s search business. LLMs combine information from different sources and increase the efficiency and convenience of search, which eventually prevents users from clicking on ads, the main source of revenue of the search giant.?

?At the same time, LLMs’ code generation capabilities present a fast-emerging opportunity for companies to improve efficiencies. We also see promising video generation use cases at Meta (Make-a-video) and Google (Imagen). And there is an exciting example from the music industry: Riffusion, which allows users to generate different types of music genres based on text prompts. Simultaneously, the gaming industry is hungry for 3D assets and avatars, creating tools for 3D object generation from text and seed meshes.???

It’s thrilling to see how these technologies can empower creators to reach further and broaden their horizons. This is a trend that I’ll surely keep an eye on during the next period.?

The Rise of AI Developer Assistants

By Eoin Woods , our CTO?

An impressive development from the world of LLM is training AI language models on large amounts of software source code and then using them as developer assistance tools. GitHub Copilot, Tabine and Amazon CodeWhisperer are good examples of recent innovations in this emerging area. ?

These tools plug into a developer's IDE and, based on what they start to type, suggest code to complete the goal they think the user wants to achieve. IDEs have had code completion for a long time, capable of simple tasks such as name completion or the generation of common language idioms via templates, saving time and typing (and the developer's memory). However, these new AI-based assistants go far beyond simple name-matching and template-style code completion. They can provide complete implementations for common problems, are capable of optimising code the developer has written and can even write code based on natural language descriptions. ?

?These tools are quite new, so unsurprisingly, there are still problems to solve in the longer run – these include cases when the generated code contains subtle errors, has maintainability issues, or does not match the conventions in the original code. Nevertheless, they present an exciting step forward and show great potential for increasing productivity in routine development tasks. I look forward to seeing how they evolve in the next few years! ?

The emergence of hybrid cloud data platforms ?

By Adriana Calomfirescu, EMBA , our Group Head of Data Delivery ?

As businesses aim to take advantage of the unique benefits of different environments – such as reliability, performance, scalability, compliance requirements and cost saving – in 2023, I expect to see hybrid cloud data platforms become more popular. These enable companies to optimise their data management solutions by combining on-premises with private or multiple public clouds while maintaining control over their data and applications, as well as integrating various SaaS data solutions (from different vendors). For instance, keeping sensitive data on-premises and less sensitive data in the (public) cloud will be an essential use case for organisations from retail to healthcare across various industries.???

Moreover, hybrid cloud data platforms will also help organisations benefit from the latest data technologies and services. To show a hands-on example: the growth of edge computing and IoT will increase the need for hybrid cloud data platforms as many IoT devices don’t have direct connectivity to the cloud, so to handle both edge and cloud data processing and storage, there is a need for a hybrid architecture. On a positive note, as cloud technology continues to evolve, it will become easier to implement hybrid cloud data platforms with these expanded capabilities.?