As the pace of technology change continues at high speed, AK Technologies are looking to the future to understand and explain how technology is transforming businesses and the ways they operate.
Next year promises to bring just as many changes to the business as we saw this year.
Digital transformation keeps progressing, driven in part by services increasingly moving to the cloud and networks becoming more flexible as Software Defined Networking solutions are rolled out.
While trends don’t exactly follow calendar years, here are the top five we think will have a marked impact on businesses in the coming year.
Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence
The mass introduction of Artificial Intelligence systems will enable greater interaction between connected machines to deliver improvements in for resource management and utilisation. Human-to-robot interactions will start to proliferate in business process as inroads to voice response technology create more sophisticated human-like ‘chat bots’.
Digital transformation
Acceleration of digitisation will be a top priority for many business leaders in 2017 to meet the ever-growing demand for customers for a digital-first experience and to take advantage of new technologies such as cloud and software defined networks. As businesses interact with the new digital world, they will need to draw value from data and improve decision making, consuming and analysing the large amounts of data, including interactions between complex systems to provide a better experience to their staff and customers.
Internet of Things (IoT)
The IoT is increasingly a reality and as narrowband technology is deployed it will enable a wide range of new devices to be connected to the network and the need for devices to make quality and real-time decisions will become acutely important. Collections of data sets will need to be maintained for accuracy and compliance with governance and policy enforcement regimes. Security technology will play key role in verification of data trust across IoT ecosystems.
Drones and Automated Vehicles
As technology and the accompanying regulation approaches continue to evolve, industrial automated vehicles will go beyond the agricultural and mining verticals where they are common place today. In 2017 we expect to see new use cases emerge in transport, logistics, and the maintenance and inspection of infrastructure. Autonomous vehicles will extend the functions of IoT devices, machine learning and automated decision making.
Virtual Reality
Broad market directions around Virtual Reality (VR) are starting to form as products become “good enough” in the consumer applications space particularly for entertainment. However, VR is rapidly finding practical use cases within businesses. VR is particularly useful in “hands-busy” tasks such as many design and maintenance scenarios, where instructions can be overlaid on the physical thing being serviced. As device durability improves, VR will find a wide variety of use cases in pre-sales, field service, maintenance and training.
