Technology Trends 2019
The concluding mark of 2018 is in the rearview mirror, and businesses looking to follow technology trends have had plenty to wade through. With 2019 sneaking ever closer, there are new advancements popping up that deliver insights about how businesses will need to reshape themselves to be able to meet customer expectations.
While a few of my top 2019 technology trends build upon the trends that I predicted for last year as well, there are definitely a few new additions as we round the bend of 2018. Let’s have a quick look into some of the most persisting trends to keep an eye on in the year to come.
Chatbots becoming ‘Good’ to ‘Great’: There will be some positive movement in the way natural language processing and sentiment analytics is progressing— NLP is expected to shake up the entire service industry in ways we’ve never imagined before. You can imagine about all the services that could be provided without humans—food chains, bank processes, job recruiters - And what not! NLP today allow companies to gather insights and improve their services based on them.
Somewhere around 40% of large businesses have or will adopt NLP by the end of 2019. Now, I am sure that most of you are alarmed on how AI and Chatbots will impact the workforce, however, I’m also quite optimistic that businesses should be up- skilling their work forces rather than displacing them - as machines may be good at delivering clear-cut requests but leave a lot to be desired when it comes to dealing with empathy. This is where human emotions are required to deliver great customer experiences.
Intelligent automation capabilities getting more prominence: In order to comprehend customer attributes even well, Marketing and Sales have started allowing integration with several platforms, such as Intelligent CRM, Sales Force Automation Platforms, Business Intelligence tools etc. with which organizations are getting enabled to carve a 360 degree, data-backed picture of their customers’ activity. With digitization on the rise to global acceptance, the scope for different businesses to engage and interact with their customers is endless. Therefore, it is ‘now’ when companies will start incorporating these trends in their strategic planning process for 2019.
Artificial Intelligence becoming an overriding force to ‘automate’: AI is invading every aspect of our life. From cameras in our smartphones having “AI detection” capabilities, to recommendation engines of online shopping retailers to AI powered drones to Self-driving cars to friend suggestions on social media to Netflix showing you exactly the kind of content you were thinking of watching…..the list is endless and it looks like AI has touched almost everything that has hit its stride. 2019 is the year where you’ll see AI getting better with the trend analysis, generating more accurate customer profiles, and deducing more accurate results from the large data sets companies have to work with.
Today, you need AI to find out how any particular customer purchases, and see if you can fulfill a need the customer has. The more personalized your content is for your customer, the higher the chance you can convert them to a sale. Gartner predicted that the majority of commercial interactions will involve a virtual agent by 2020). Undoubtedly, using smart AI solutions to enhance your business, along with your sales and marketing strategies, won’t be an option in 2019. If you’re not on the leading curve, you’re definitely falling behind.
Connected Cloud continues to meet changing business needs: Cloud platform services are growing at a rate of 20%, this will certainly help the overall tech outsourcing category (which itself is supposed to grow by around 6% by the end of this year). With this, consulting services have already started feeling the positive effects of cloud, and are expected to grow at a rate of around 5% by next year.
However, at times going just public cloud or private cloud isn’t the best option and require a mix of all or both. Threfore, in 2019, connected cloud (hybrid) will dominate—whether you want to cloud-source storage, networking, security, or app deployment. In fact, Multi-cloud will be the new buzzword for the cloud conversation and what I believe this means that no matter which workloads are being run in which cloud, the experience for IT and those who are leveraging the applications needs to be seamless, secure and streamlined. For businesses, this means a mix of workloads running in public, private and hybrid environments and will become big topic in 2019.
Intelligent Database Management coupled with Machine learning will continue to disrupt the industry: Bots make the effort around lead generation even more productive. Now, you can actually reduce the time taken to acquire the ‘next new customer’ by leveraging extraction business rules and database management, quite logically. Infact, culling out effective contactable database with multiple validations and checkpoints will become a reality by leveraging those technologically enhanced bots that can provide, logical, accurate, complete and validated data in a very short span of time. For instance:
- Contact finder bot – fill up the gaps in your customer database contactibility
- Email finder bot – identify the right email address for a given set of database with varying degrees of accuracy and completeness.
- Bots can help you map verticals and sub-verticals to an organization based on its name, location etc.
- Bots can help you validate employee count in an organization.
- Bots can help you map the techno graph of an organization.
Analytics will become a bigger sales conversion catalyst than ever before: IDC forecasts, the Big Data industry to reach $102 billion by 2019. By fueling the industry with predictive analytics and machine learning capabilities, and unlocking some of the meaningful insights that we wouldn’t get otherwise, organizations understand the overall picture of a customer’s business health. Infact, when Big Data is coupled with AI, it helps not only in keeping a track of a large amount of data, but also making recommendations based on the past purchase behaviors, thereby increasing the propensity to purchase even more. 2019 will see a lot more emphasis on building visually appealing information centers in Sales-Tech platforms to enable better customer conversion.
Blockchain may take a leap, but gradually: Blockchain took a jump in 2017-2018. However, at this point, it seems more like a marketing ploy than a bonafide technology offering. My prediction is a lot of smart developers will continue to work on realizing the potential of blockchain in 2019, however, I’m of the mindset that it will take 2-3 more years before we actually start to see the traction that has been promised earlier.
Speech/Image recognition will enable faster reporting: Digital transformation and AI proliferation will leverage the progress made in speech recognition to improve the deployment of sales tools by replacing input mechanism through speech. Speech to text progression in local languages is still trailing behind English speech conversion. The overall experience of a sales platform usage can be enhanced exponentially by driving data input through voice.
The telecom industry is already moving fast in this direction leveraging this capability in smart phones. With the focus on analytics and market insights the need to capture more last mile data is going up by the day, and speech to text/ image recognition evolution will become the primary drivers of such data capture. The same will be leveraged by the sales industry and thus, reduce the ongoing struggle between deployment and effective usage.
Reality Trends (AR, VR, MR and XR) to take the market by storm:
- Virtual Reality (VR): The current situation of VR remote training is exploring physical tasks that the employees can perform to test their skills. It has now become an effective form of learning and perfecting industry skills. Although the entirety of the VR remote training scheme has not been invented yet, the reality technology holds great potential. Globally, employers and employees have interacted via internet so far, however, now VR takes this to another level. In the near future, it is predicted that VR will make remote training even easier.
- Augmented Reality (AR): AR is an innovative strategy to increase sales by allowing the customers to be more liberal with the product browsing. In fact, brands like IKEA and New Look have already introduced augmented reality into their promotions. For instance, IKEA allows its customers to place the desired furniture in a room they wish and witness the results in maximum AR clarity. Even upcoming movie promos are introducing AR selfie filters on popular applications to attract media and customer attention. The brands are recognising the worth of AR marketing in today’s generation.
- Mixed Reality (MR): While virtual reality can transport the user into a reality filled with data and charts to manipulate as they want, augmented reality can even incorporate tangible elements into the world. Therefore, we are hopeful that mixed reality can give us the desired data.
- Extended Reality (XR): The reality technology does not end at AR and VR and MR rather extends beyond it, aiming a more immersive and ubiquitous experience. By 2019, customers and users will be experiencing technology like never before that strives to bridge the physical distance between people, information and experiences. Supply chains are now choosing extended reality over traditional operations by enabling their customers to visually place orders. This has significantly improved a company’s productivity.
GDPR forces will influence smart customer’s decision: 2018 was the year of GDPR and other global initiatives to protect consumer data. Stories of data breaches finally rose to the level where governments got involved to regulate how companies can use the data of their customers. In 2019, I believe that GDPR is the start of a more global trend that will hold companies accountable for how they treat privacy and personal data. While brands do not necessarily want to have to comply, this movement will serve as a caveat to companies to figure out better ways to genuinely build relationships with their customers as opposed to the often clear misuse and abuse of personal data in the name of marketing and selling.
Informed customers will now see which companies truly care about protecting their data, and which companies don’t. While the deluge of email updates was unwelcome, most consumers wholeheartedly agree with the principles of GDPR. Companies who go to great lengths to protect and not share user’s data, are seen as more trustworthy and good places to connect with. In 2019, companies that take a longer road in privacy and transparency will be rewarded
Ultimately, staying competitive means adapting to the changes and there will be plenty in 2019 and beyond. It’s time to get started!