The 5 Biggest Technology Trends in 2021
At present, businesses are evolving at a great pace. What is trending today will be obsolete tomorrow. Here are the top 05 megatrends that are helping businesses of all shapes and sizes cope with this new pandemic situation. The trends have fast-tracked and accelerated by the companies in the post-pandemic era. Here is a list of what are the latest trends:
Artificial Intelligence and BIG DATA
We live in a world where we need more real-time decisions. Companies have realized that the data they had pre-pandemic is no longer valid. Things are changing so fast, companies are looking at streaming analytics, analyze real-time data, and predictions are based on data available for the last 90 days instead of the last 10 years. All this is largely driven by AI and the use of Big Data.
AI is helping in building automated warehouses that look for trends themselves. BIG retailers are learning from the automated systems, cookies sales are going up, alcohol sales are going up and few other things going down. AI is enabling organizations to streamline their businesses. It’s the most powerful technology mankind has had access to so far. AI can read, write, see, analyze things in terms of videos and photographs. It can hear and all of this is helping organizations reimagine and transform their business processes.
AI is currently at its infancy stage and has a lot of unexplored potentials. The tailwind impact of the pandemic has influenced various enterprises to look for AI solutions.
Robotics, Vehicle Automations, and Drones
Organizations need to think and see how they can automate, streamline, and improve their business operations. Robots, Automated Vehicles, and Drones can help with all of this. For instance, Amazon has automated its warehouses as much as possible. They are also taking automation to their supply chain and see how by use of drones they can deliver their parcels. Robots are delivering parcels to houses in Milton Keynes in the UK. Ford has designed a Robotic postman to deliver parcels even upstairs in people’s houses.
UPS is using self-driving trucks for their supply chain management. Daimler is already running self-driving trucks. Rolls Royce together with Google is building self-floating ships that can steer into oceans. In Singapore a robotic Doctor called Spot monitors how people adhere to social distancing in parks, if it finds a cluster of people, it walks up to them and tells them to maintain social distance. Heathrow airport is using sanitizing robots to operate all night long to sanitize the entire terminal for the next day of operations.
These automations are just the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot happening behind them.
As A Service and The Cloud Computing Revolution
The pandemic has brought a drastic change in our work processes. People are now working from home; the way people shop is completely changed, and it is enabled by the cloud infrastructure. Think of ZOOM, WebEx; everyone is using video conference calling which is now the new norm. There is a huge spike in demand for video conferencing solutions and they have been able to scale seamlessly due to the huge cloud infrastructure they have leveraged. Robots and Automation of Vehicles are available as a service.
Thanks to the cloud computing revolution I can go to companies like Microsoft or Google or Honda and say can you give me a robot, a security robot, or a warehousing robot that you can simply rent and have programmed for your specific needs. You can give them back if you don’t need them anymore. We can rent AI as A Service. Google, Microsoft, Amazon are providing AI as A Service e.g. recommendation engine on your website to suggest products from Amazon that use its powerful engine and algorithm.
Faster Networks and 5G
This is enabling all the previous trends we have been talking about. We need faster networks to work from home and faster networks to access cloud computing. We need faster networks and connectivity to enable robots and cars to drive around in the open world. 5G is a key enabler to all of this. 5G gives us powerful and fast connectivity, much faster than the connectivity we currently experience today.
Extended Reality
This is virtual and augmented reality to change our behaviors and change our business processes. 5G is enabling augmented and virtual reality anywhere. At the moment, we are confined to goggles and strong Wi-Fi connectivity to experience VR and AR. 5G and faster network means we will be able to experience AR and VR in a mobile environment. Facebook has launched VR glasses that look like sunglasses.
AR and VR are helping companies reimagine their business processes and customer service experiences. In a pandemic situation, we might not want to walk into a store to try hats or wear clothes. VR and AR enable us to do this virtually completely online in a virtual world. We have a virtual ‘Avatar’ that can try on our clothes, we can use AR to try on glasses, makeup. We can try anything we want to buy without actually interacting with a human being. This will also potentially change the way we have online Team meetings. In the future, we may wear a headset and experience sitting in a virtual room with our colleagues around.
