As governments across the globe continue to accelerate their COVID-19 vaccine distribution programs, businesses are bracing themselves for the post-pandemic era, designing strategies to engage customers and employees in this “new normal”!
The pandemic of 2020 not only brought the world to a standstill, but it also radically shifted peoples’ consumption and perception of technologies, and the underlying assumptions that organizations had about these solutions. In simple terms – pre-COVID ideas and assumptions may no longer stay valid in the post-COVID world.
As dismal as it may sound, nevertheless, the COVID-19 did reward organizations with the golden opportunity to rethink their purpose, offerings, and above all – their future – allowing them to leverage this new tide of behaviors and technologies to their benefit.
Here are the key technology trends that we believe will flourish across 2022 and beyond.
With the rising volume of data and analytics, adoption of cloud infrastructure was rising consistently over the past few years. However, COVID-19 prompted a mass exodus to remote working, creating a sudden surge in cloud adoption across all industries. In fact, Gartner estimates that cloud spending increased by 19% in 2020, and spending on public cloud will grow 18.4% to US$ 304.9 billion through 2021.
And while organizations evolved their public and distributed infrastructures, growth in industrial and automotive IoT devices has led to rise in adoption of edge computing, which helps in reducing the latency caused by traditional cloud computing environments. The global edge computing market is estimated to reach US$ 15.7 billion by 2025.
Although the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and associated technologies was prevalent for the past few years, not many organizations succeeded in moving past a proof of concept (POC), resulting in failed AI projects primarily due to issues with strategy, scalability, or governance.
However, the pandemic gave AI its due moment, as organizations pan industries and continents embraced it at lightning speeds – from building COVID-19 public forecasts to deploying chatbots and virtual agents that assisted customers as well as remotely working employees, to leveraging RPA for health screening and contact tracking to automating financial relief programs. In fact, Gartner predicts that RPA software revenue will reach US$2 billion in 2021, while the business value created by AI will reach US$3.9 trillion in 2022.
Business have been leveraging hyperautomation for quite some years now, primarily to embrace digital transformation and achieve operational excellence. However, COVID-19 accelerated the need to automate routine work like allocating tasks or collecting customer feedback, allowing leaders to focus on tasks of strategic or creative nature. In fact, Gartner predicts that 69% of managerial work will be fully automated by 2024, lowering operational costs by 30%.
Quite naturally, beyond automating legacy and back-office processes, the next abode for hyperautomation bridging organizational silos to enhance customer experience through value-added services and competitive differentiation.
Although immersive technologies have been around for nearly a decade, their enterprise adoption have been sparse, primarily due to the huge investments and complex nature of these technologies. However, although the worldwide spend in AR/VR declined in 2020, the pandemic also paved way to newer applications and use cases for immersive technologies.
Organizations rapidly deployed AR/VR experiences to engage their customers and employees, as well as drive business processes – from virtual shopping to education, and from remote patient care to manufacturing.
The global AR & VR market is projected to grow by US$125 billion during 2020-2024, at a CAGR of over 35%.
Cybersecurity has been a priority across industries for a long time. However, the pandemic made leaders reconsider cybersecurity as a strategic business priority, and not just an IT decision. The demand was further boosted by growing cloud-based products and services.
This led business leaders to mature their cybersecurity approaches by designing risk-optimized strategies while enhancing their service and delivery models.
Gartner estimates that the information security spending grew by 2.4% to reach US$123.8 billion in 2020.
