Technological Trends of 2018
As technology continues to evolve we must be prepared to take advantage of the digital and technical opportunities that present themselves to us. 2018 has saw huge change but there have been trends with have been constant throughout the year that everyone should be aware about.
The massive trend that is commonly occurring is artificial intelligence is becoming a political talking point. While AI is considered to be mostly good there is also some negatives which have been associated with it and that is what is causing a talking point. This year in particular has seen news story after news story about the devastating effects of artificial intelligence mainly in the self-driving car field. While this is what makes news and sells newspapers the media is never talking about the good that artificial intelligence is doing for the world.
The second trend is that consumers will become accustomed to dealing and talking with technology. With the introduction of Amazon smart and Google Home we are starting to see a shift in consumer’s willingness to trust technology. It was estimated that over 20 million Amazon smart speakers were sold last year, highlighting how consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with artificial intelligence based platforms.
The final and probably the most consistent trend is data becoming and being offered as a service. Why this is the most important trend is because it has strong interests from a broad number of industries that are jumping on the bandwagon. The conversation around how to take advantage of data you already own, and develop products that will generate increasingly volumes of valuable data has continuously gained intensity over the past year. An example of this is Robotic Marketer, a tech start-up which is selling data as a service through marketing strategies. Robotic Marketer is an artificial intelligence platform which writes marketing strategies for you by scraping the internet for data that no human without technology would be able to gain access too. This technology is a successful example of how more and more firms are looking to sell data now as a service and just quietly how good is a robot that does all the research for you.