The top 5 tech predictions for 2018

In what I deem “The Year of Fruition,” 2018 will bring us impressive innovations, exciting new experiments, force us to discuss difficult ethical questions, and give us an expedited glimpse into our increasingly connected, insightful, and efficient futures.

What we once called the “Big Data Problem” is now known as the “fourth industrial revolution.” I’ve mentioned it before, and if you keep up to date with technological innovations and trends, you’re already familiar with the term. If there’s one thing we know about the fourth industrial revolution, it’s that we are in the beginnings, and progress is both rapid and inevitable. Many of the booms we’ll see in the tech industry this year will be technologies we are already accustomed to as tech-industry professionals; it’s the growth, specialization, and introductions in the mainstream that will have us at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution in 2018.

There are five major technological trends that I predict will make huge strides in 2018: mixed reality (MR), blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), the internet-of-things (IoT) and developments in how we use data.

Assuming you are already acquainted with these terms – to some degree – I’ll dive right into which industries will invest and benefit most as well as a pioneering use case of how one of these industries is already beginning to benefit from their investments in these technologies.

1)   Mixed Reality (MR)- Going Mainstream

Industry examples: Media, Manufacturing and Supply Chain

2016 and 2017 not only brought AR to the general public with apps like Pokémon Go and Snapchat, but also showcased the possibilities MR (AR + VR) has to offer businesses.

We’re Not Playing Games: Enterprise VR Summit cites a recent Deloitte study, indicating that “more than 150 companies across multiple industries, including 52 of the Fortune 500, are testing or have implemented AR / VR solutions.” Enterprise functions that take advantage of MR solutions include those that “augment and improve training, design, manufacturing, communications, sales, field service, data visualization, and more.” In Enterprise AR & VR: Don’t Forget About the ‘Enterprise’ Part, Mike Boland predicts that a more clear Return on Investment (ROI) around business procedures and operations will lead to enterprise applications outpacing consumer markets.

Pokémon Go reached six hundred million dollars in revenue faster than any app in history (in just ninety days), and reached one billion dollars by February of 2017. Snapchat’s AR ad revenue was projected to reach one billion dollars by the end of 2017, but did not reach the mark. Explorations like these have begun to make people think that AR is just a novelty, and we’ve been desensitized to its gimmicks since Pokémon Go hit the market. However, while I think AR will likely make a comeback into mobile gaming, much of AR’s business-related potentials have been largely overlooked. There have been a number of innovations by companies utilizing MR that I believe are just a taste of what’s to come for 2018.     

Use Case – Manufacturing:

Microsoft’s HoloLens is paving the way for the use of augmented reality in warehouses and across the supply chain. With Azure Active Directory, mobile device management (MDM) and data security like BitLocker, Microsoft is also stepping up their IoT security from-the-jump (we’ll talk more about IoT later on). In Satya Nadella’s keynote speech at Ignite in 2017, there was a presentation of HoloLens being used in conceptual scenarios for Ford, the car manufacturer. In the presentation, HoloLens was used to brainstorm design options for the Ford Fusion. The whole of the presentation shows how the HoloLens works in conjunction with Microsoft 365, but even without the advanced productivity of Microsoft 365, augmented (or in this case “mixed”) reality proves the time and cost effectiveness touted by Microsoft with the HoloLens.

Design isn’t the only use for AR in the supply chain industry either. In a white paper on supply chain management, Microsoft outlines the uses of MR across the supply chain: from purchasing goods, to sourcing goods, replenishing stock, manufacturing finished goods, configuring and running demos, and logging and viewing events. Utilizing MR, supply chain management will become more seamless and allow manufacturing and industry to innovate faster than ever and deliver more accuracy in aspects from designs to filling orders. The data mined from these technologies will only further advancements and efficiencies.

2)   Blockchain – Beyond the Cryptocurrency Niche

Industries: Finance, Healthcare, Education, Supply Chain, Intellectual Property, IoT and Personal Assets

With less creation time, fewer development costs, it’s no wonder the tech world is enamored with blockchain. While bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies continue to keep the world guessing, blockchain will begin to be recognized and utilized for its strengths beyond cryptocurrency this year.

The Blockchain Research Institute expects blockchain to become the “second generation” of the fourth industrial revolution and IDC Health Insights predicts that 20% of organizations will have moved beyond pilot projects and will have operationalized blockchain by 2020. I predict that this year (along with many others) that blockchain will see huge progress in that revolution.

Blockchain has many advantages: it provides a single source of truth with complete transparency, provides real-time processing and is resistant to hacking like no other technology available. Blockchain gives companies an opportunity to communicate and scale applications to maximize the company’s output. Ian Worral of Encrypted Labs makes a case for blockchain’s ability to solve the issues around company owned ledger systems and the difficulty and high-costs of integrating those ledger systems with other systems.

Use Case – Education:

Fittingly, MIT is among the first universities to utilize blockchain technology to issue recipient-owned, virtual credentials. In 2017, we saw how important transparency and authenticity are, when it comes to online identities and data. MIT’s “Digital Diploma System” gives us some insight into solving that problem in the future. With the Digital Diploma System, MIT heralds the ability for employers and schools to verify that a given degree is legitimate, simply by using a link or uploading a file. Not only is this information transparent and unchangeable, it’s also secure.

MIT’s Digital Diploma System gives us a great example of why blockchain is (and should be) so intriguing to the financial, healthcare, and intellectual property sectors. Imagine medical records being easily shared among an individual’s network of doctors and practitioners, without concern of losing their social security number and other critical information in a breach. The same goes for financial data. 2018 will be the year of blockchain experimentation. Many of those experiments will fail, but both failure and success will push us further into a transparent, authentic, and secure online experience.

3)   Artificial Intelligence - Becomes Real

Industries: Virtually all industries

As Forrester has so blatantly pointed out in a recent report. “The Honeymoon for AI is Over.” As companies see the multitude of benefits AI holds (for productivity, data management, data intelligence, communication, etc.), what has been a lot of excitement over AI will turn into a more practical, diligent focus.

In 2018, companies will begin to invest heavily in their AI portfolios, focus on use-cases with finer business specialties, transform their user experiences, understand the ROI of business-focused AI outputs, and utilize insights for their business strategies. Over the past few years, we’ve been slowly unlocking the most fruitful possibilities for AI in our businesses. Through bots, machine learning powered AI and data mining, we’ve already seen the value AI contains to drive ROI, help the bottom line, transform our productivity and make better decisions.

2018 will be all about honing expertise, specialties, responsibilities and/or regulations around implementing AI into organizations. Business leaders will be working with governments to create responsible AI, developers will become increasingly specialized, and employees and customers alike will become accustomed to working and interacting with AI and machine learning on a regular basis.

Microsoft along with Amazon, Facebook, Apple and others, has already begun working with academic and other leaders to ensure AI systems are fair, reliable, safe, private and secure in their Partnership on AI. In their blog post “The Top Ten Tech Issues for 2018”, they also discuss the coming concerns over jobs and the necessary shifts our education systems will need to make in response. 2018 will bring a boom in “Insights-as-a-Service” and bring us closer to “Everything-as-a-Service”.

All of this progress will spearhead us even beyond the modern workplace to a modernized way of living- human and machine, living in conjunction.

Use Case – Business automation:

Here, at Microsoft, I’ve been working on a set of business automation (sales & marketing) tools which assist sales representatives and partners in walking customers from the discovery to implementation phases of the buyer’s journey, and even help them map out further deployments.

Every phase of this toolset utilizes AI or machine learning in some way. The backbone of the tools are industry and role customized scenarios. We now utilize machine learning to populate the most successful scenarios to the sales representative upon selecting the client’s industry, role, size of business, etc.

The sales representative can customize each presentation further, showcasing the human and machine working together. In a following phase, a bot helps sales representatives and customer through a virtual, Microsoft 365 environment, carrying over scenarios previously chosen through machine learning.

In a sales representative’s dashboards, machine learning and AI are used to collate data about their accounts (such as risk, propensity, etc.) and give them actionable insights (i.e. when to reach out to particular accounts, with the most at-risk accounts surfaced first). As the tool set continues to collect these insights, the tool comes closer and closer to 100% win rates. Utilizing these machine-learning-driven predictions, we are now working on a simplified and highly adaptive to-customer version, so that Microsoft customers will be able to discover the reality of Microsoft 365, customized to their needs, all on their own.

By buckling down and taking on AI with focus and discernment, I believe 2018 will deliver on the promise of customer centric engagement and experiences.

4)   Internet-of-Things (IoT) – Rapid Growth

Industries: Supply Chain, Retail and more…

The move towards smart-homes and seamless, cross-device experiences will be on a more rapid trajectory in 2018. Despite security concerns, the IoT industry isn’t going to slow down its progress. We’re already seeing more homes have digital assistants, such as Alexa or Google Home, and companies like Microsoft are connecting apps between devices for a more integral experience from home computer to mobile to work. Combining the powers of IoT and AI can especially benefit manufacturing companies from supply chain management, to operations management and logistics. In retail, IoT will streamline the purchasing process and lend the ability to target consumers in a more intimate, fruitful way.

As the internet-of-things continues to grow, threats will develop in tandem. I suspect that security threats will increase and become more money oriented. Bad actors will quickly find new vulnerabilities and exploit them with speed and precision. I also suspect that growth will out-pace regulation, as governments struggle to stay up to speed with innovation.

Use Case – Supply Chain

IDC has been reporting on the global manufacturing landscape with projections about their road towards digital transformation in the coming years. They conclude that in 5 years, “20% of the top manufacturers will depend on a secure backbone of embedded intelligence, using IoT, blockchain, and cognitive systems, to automate large-scale processes and speed execution times by up to 25%.” This year will be the launch pad from which IoT sets on a lightspeed trajectory as more IoT devices are connected in the cloud, allowing data-rich organizations to become insights-rich organizations.

With an emphasis on the marriage between IoT and AI, Microsoft Azure enables manufacturers to collect data from factory sensors (about inventory, production machinery, quality of ingredients, etc.) and use algorithms which provide actionable insights for corrective actions and strategic opportunities. Leveraging Azure for collecting and understanding not only supply chain management data, but also sales, operations, logistics and beyond, is only one industry example.

It’s easy to see how such technology gives organizations holistic views of their products and processes, and that the union between IoT devices and cognitive systems (machine learning, AI, etc.) helps organizations make better product, marketing, and production decisions. This contextual, deep understanding of how organizations are running, how products are sold, and how customers interact with products and brands enables the full maturity of the fourth industrial revolution and makes our smart-home, self-driving car, cross-device fantasies into reality.

Data: Privacy and Consumerization

Industries: Virtually all industries

This will be a hot-button item over the next year, as companies increasingly democratize and consumerized access to their data and governments push initiatives giving more control of personal data back to end-users.

Advances in self-service BI apps and the increased adoption of public cloud are opening the doors for more employees to access and understand pertinent data than ever before. Organizations want to share their data with their employees: to break data out of its siloes and spread it across departments to benefit every area of an organization. As the workforce becomes more data-literate and technologies make it easier than ever to visualize and understand contextual data, the benefits of transparent organizational data will be seen and adapted by many.

Paradoxically, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) around the corner, we’ll see a new wave of data privacy legislature being drafted and implemented, across the globe. GDPR gives EU residents more control over their personal data which will most obviously effect the retail industry and B2C companies, but will also have repercussions for B2B companies who utilize individuals’ data to gather insights, target ads and make decisions.

Overall, the wide-spread use of data will affect personalization across the internet. Large technology companies will create big initiatives for providing a more personalized experience to their users. Companies will need to provide justifications to users as to why sharing their data also positively impacts their online experiences. Marketers are especially seeing the benefits and challenges of democratized data, as the advertising industry has already totally transformed and shows no sign of stopping its progress.

The challenge for companies is going to lie in managing data. With data being shared across the globe, regulators will enforce varying laws in their respective countries, and it will be up to organizations to ensure they can meet regulatory compliance needs while maintaining organizational productivity.

Microsoft, Apple and to a certain extent Amazon have less dependence on personal information compared to Google and Facebook. Not even one per cent of Apple's income comes from advertising. For Google and Facebook, however, gathering as much data as possible is core to their business model.

In 2018, we will see new pressures for companies to change the way they collect and use their customers' data – and that pressure will come from governments. Companies such as Google and Facebook may have to agree to regulation that could hurt their business models. You can read more on this topic in this recent post on Wired.com.

Companies, like Microsoft, are already preparing for these challenges with build-in security and compliance features into their productivity suites, allowing for better data management. We’ll see organizations continue on this course, and further in the future we may see blockchain shoulder some of this burden.

2018 – Bird’s Eye View:

2018 is going to be the year of fruition. Valuable technologies will be more seriously invested in, researched, and applied. Strong alliances between specialists in these areas and the organizations investing in them will prove the road to the tech-enabled future.

While the true paths for these technologies are yet to be seen, the one, certain characterization for them all is the speed in which their potentials will be truly discovered.

Brace yourselves this year: get ready to put your nose-to-the-grindstone, place your bets with confidence, and devote yourself to experimenting, being open to new risks and discovering possibilities you’ve only dreamed of- until now.

Look forward to your comments and feedback.You can find more blogs on Machine Learning (ML) trends, Sales Enablement, Marketing Technology and related topics on my LinkedIn profile and Twitter.