Technology Optimism for 2022

As we return to the office, it can feel a bit like?Groundhog Day?with this (3rd? 4th??nth?) pandemic wave, weighing on all of our minds now we're in Year 3.??However:?I'm still filled with optimism for the year ahead.

I'm optimistic because I'm a technologist, and believe technology continues to hold huge potential and promise to drive efficiency, new capabilities and improvements for individuals and society at a whole.

Some of the technology advancements of 2021 were fantastic:?

• The medical profession produced astounding improvements unimagined just three years ago.?mRNA vaccines have gone from niche to mainstream, and will trigger a range of new treatments in multiple branches of healthcare.?Remember that this was all made possible because we were able to sequence SARS-Cov-2 virus genomes in a single weekend in January 2020, enabled by cheap compute power.?I remember the first sequencing of the entire human genome took 13 years and billions of dollars!?The exponential improvement in compute?costs in combination with better techniques has driven a step change in looking after our communities.
• Our remote working technology got better and better.?The idea of running any entire company on video conference was fanciful in 2019; a reality in 2020 but then evolved further in 2021.?Here at ANZ we ran an online conference for 10,000 invitees and 100 presenters, using graduates to do much of the producing over Teams for a week in November, with groups from more than five countries participating in round tables, chats, live polling and more.?Remote interfaces are only going to?get richer this year?as we access conversations from more locations with more devices.?
• AI continues to improve every day lives.??While some people outside of Technology consider?AI as either a buzzword?or unfathomably sentient, those of us closer to the technology understand intrinsically the power of machine learning run over very large data sets, permitting new capability to be implemented seamlessly and at pace.?One of my favourites for 2021 - Google Maps uses the movement of your phone's GPS and accelerometer to work out traffic flows to drive Maps and navigation,?and can now work out when cars have hard braking events.?The hard part is that phones move independently of the car (I might throw the phone on the seat next to me) - so AI identifies pattern differences (for example, those cars that have hard braking events when using Android Auto).?
• AI is starting to make TV fiction real.??The old "enhancing images now" you see in a crime show where the good guys make a grainy picture sharp is?garbage.?You can't create pixels where there weren't any before....except now you can.?SR3 is a new technique?that uses models trained on things like faces, allowing to infer the missing pixels.?It's of course still a guess, but this another example of tangible and previously impossible improvements made real from AI.?
• AI?made my life better with phone calls?in 2021.?I use a modern Android phone which gave me two incredibly helpful features.?Firstly, I can use it to screen calls - an AI agent will answer the phone in a human voice and ask the caller what they want to speak to me about. (the spammers hang up, the good guys can make their case).??But the bigger feature is not having to be on hold! I was put on hold for nearly two hours?- but I didn't listen to hold music, the AI agent listened on my behalf, and when it detected a real person taking my call, my phone seamlessly connected me.??
• Speech recognition, cognition and synthesis?continue to make strides. I had a blast hearing myself speaking French in an impeccable accent through?training an online voice model?and pasting in some French text.?(For the record, I speak nearly zero French.)
• Speech recognition and 'everything is capition-able' is having major impacts in everyone's lives even within my extended family. Not only can a relative who's hard of hearing get captioned video calls with our family, we all benefit at work with the ability to have our work calls captioned (and/or transcripted) in real time.
• Privacy improvements are making big strides.??The tech industry has attracted?a deserved amount of criticism for carelessness with society's data, and is changing.??Cookie acceptance forms on every web site are tiresome, but we are getting more controls back in our hands.??3rd party cookies and other advertising techniques are increasingly falling out of favour, and I believe we'll see a better 2022 ahead.?Of course, data privacy is critical in banking - privacy is and always will be a first class priority for ANZ.
• There are some bigger bets emerging?- technologies with high potential but low certainty of success.?The metaverse is of course faddish, but the Oculus VR headset was a hugely popular Christmas item, the app?jumping to the #1 spot?on iOS jumping to the #1 spot?on iOS over the holiday period.?I think a shift is happening - how it will play out and who drives the biggest innovation clearly remains open.?Elsewhere the world remains highly interested in crypto and the potential in banking, and the investment in Quantum Computing continues unabated.

ANZ continues to invest in technology to make material advancements that are strongly connected to these trends.?Our progress to cloud is well advanced and we're moving more workload every day.?We have material amounts of data in modern data platforms and our embrace of ML is delivering better customer outcomes. We are building out additional modern customer experiences - we'll be seeing more soon from ANZ Plus.?We continue to explore foundational changes and uplifts across our technology- from core banking to payments, from risk management to employee collaboration.?And we're spending a significant amount of attention dramatically modernising our engineering techniques to give us step changes in reliability, efficiency and sophistication.

I think it's an exciting time: to be in our team, to be in ANZ, and to be part of this industry.?Here's to an ambitious 2022!