The technologies developed in the 2020s like data fabric, cyber AI, analytics cloud, blockchain, Web 3.0, automation, NFC, VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) are likely to affect businesses in the next years replacing human labor and laying the foundation for the future. 

At the beginning of the year we did research on tech trends 2022 and what’s coming up next, and came up with a few insights on what we foresee coming up next in the world of tech industry. Here are our top 10 insights:

Data Fabric

As enterprises are overloaded with the sheer volume of data, the software stack complexity will become more and more simplified with leading AI companies like Google and Microsoft, making sure that the data is standardized and managed cost-effectively. Data fabric will act as an extra layer on top of IT infrastructure, pulling all the data together into one spot, from cloud infrastructures to remote endpoints. For example, CXL (Computer Express Link) is now keeping pace to meet the demands of emerging workloads for AI. Rather than experiencing data overload, we will actually experience the opposite effect. Gartner named data fabric a top technology trend of 2022 that is crucial for businesses. You can read Gartner’s report here.

Hyperautomation

According to Gartner, hyperautomation will be worth almost $600 billion by 2022. Companies will understand better how to automate, abstract, and outsource their business processes and realize that using powerful technology tools such as data analytics, cloud, blockchain, and cyber AI can create more powerful new business models to gain competitive advantage. Migrating away from manual administration to self-service and engineered automation, IT back office will be more and more automated, and ICT will disrupt itself with automation on scale (NoOps, Zero Trust, DevSecOps). See Deloitte’s 13th annual Tech Trends report on how to automate at scale.  

Metaverse

The physical and digital worlds will be fused – media will interact with us in dynamic ways on all platforms. In essence, Meta, the new name of the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is Metaverse social channel on which other companies can grow and develop their own technologies and businesses. Facebook has created an economy far larger than many nations. Take, for example, companies like Spotify, Stocktwits, Tweetdeck and Zynga, (amongst others) that have gained huge profits “piggybacking” on these social media platforms. Just like gamers, we will all become a part of a virtual world named ‘Metaverse’ unknown to us yet where we will all be avatars in the game of life. See Andrew White’s article published on Gartner titled “Really, What is the metaverse?” on how the metaverse will effectively become a digital twin of the universe.

AR/VR devices

AR/VR (augmented and virtual reality) are about to become a normal part of our everyday lives. We will own digital goods and many of them will be linked to our real world assets. It’s already happening – the omnipresent trend at CES 2022 is the next generation products. The show is full of AR/VR devices and smart glasses, alongside Sony’s PlayStation VR 2, Meta’s Oculus Quest 2, Apple’s AR headset with Wi-Fi 6E, and curved LG Oled TV. See the best CES2022 tech gadgets you can buy right now here. 

Analytics Cloud

Data analytics will dominate Big Data. We will see more and more “edge clouds”, where the computer comes to the edge of the datacenter instead of the data going to the cloud. With AI-driven near real-time analytics solutions it will be easier to find precisely the right data in place no matter where it was created.

Some data is easier to process than others. For example, log files, audio, video, image files lack a consistent structure, which means it’s hard to search across the data. Because of this, data lakes end up becoming data swamps: it is too hard to search, extract and analyze what you need. Data lake houses like DataBricks helps analysts by organizing the data into “notebooks” and making it easy to visualize data through the use of dashboards. That puts data owners in control of where their data lives across clouds and storage so that data can reside in the right place at the right time. See report published by the LF Edge arm of the Linux Foundation on edge clouds innovations.

Tele-nearly-anything

Human relationships will no longer be as physically dependent and we will have cyberspace access for tele-education, tele-work, tele-medicine, tele-commerce, and so forth. We will be more and more tele-connected – already today we’re working on Slack, meet on Zoom, and run in the park tracking our progress online, or weight loss with iPhone apps that connect to our social media profiles and enable us to keep track of our progress as well as share the data with our friends. 

Hyperloop

The new form of high-speed transport will revolutionize travel, just like cars, trains and planes did in the past, making travel more affordable and faster. For example, Virgin Group is developing supersonic planes that will be cheaper and 2.6 times faster than current commercial planes, passenger pods that will carry passengers at speeds 750 miles an hour (1,200 kph) through almost air-free vacuum tunnels using magnetic levitation. 

Web 3.0

Soon in an age of Web 3.0, we will no longer need to search for information on search browsers as information will find us based on all this data which companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are collecting about each and every one of us: our interests, our likes and dislikes. The right information will be served to the right people at the right time, saving us all a lot of time, effort and energy. 

NFC technology

NFC (near-field communication) will become more dominant. According to ABI Research, there will be 1.6 billion NFC-enabled devices by 2024, and the market size is predicted to reach $30 billion by 2023. Today, NFC payments with a phone (Samsung Pay, Google Pay, Apple Pay) and QR are already part of our lives, but very soon NFC technology will be developed further enabling more safe and valid biometric payments to offer us special promotions, coupons and tips based on our geographical location. 

Blockchain: Ready for business

Trendy cryptocurrencies will become the normal payment method whilst the nonfungible tokens (NFTs) – the normal way to globally transact digital goods. Meanwhile, blockchain and DLT platforms are on the way to fundamentally change the nature of doing business across organizational boundaries. They are already helping companies to take a more automated approach to how they make and manage identity, data, brand, provenance, professional certifications, copyrights, and other tangible and digital assets.

All of these insights are of course complete assumptions based on our years of experience in the tech industry and following trends occurring all over the digital space. And what do you think is coming up next in the tech industry?