What is (likely) to happen in 2018? The future of technology

Now that Christmas is well and truly out of the way (sigh), it’s time to take a look into the future and predict what is likely to be prominent in 2018…

Breadcrumbing data

With contactless becoming the new norm, it’s easy to grab a coffee or use your contactless card on the tube. However, whilst doing this, your data is being captured… pretty much everywhere. This is going to start a breadcrumb effect which will lead to an explosion in data for brands.

This extent of this data can be seen through an average internet minute - ‘Just in the average minute, Facebook receives 900,000 logins, more than 450,000 Tweets are posted, and 156 million emails and 15 million texts are sent.With numbers like that, it’s no wonder we’re essentially doubling the amount of data created in the world roughly every two years.’

Interacting with technology

As already mentioned above, technology is becoming built into our everyday lives, and with that, a lot smarter. The increase of data is mainly due to the IoT (Internet of Things) which allows all products to be connected, so they are all constantly capturing data.

How us humans interact with technology has been changing. Smart technology is starting to take over our worlds with driverless cars just around the corner and Alexa becoming an everyday item in our homes - is it the year of the laundry folding robot?!

The continuing rise of AI

We have talked and talked about it (even written a whitepaper about it, which you can find here) but AI really is here to stay. Businesses are leaping into developing AI, probably a bit quicker than they should be, in order to compete with bigger brands. However, there are only a handful of brands that are utilising AI well (there are a lot of bad bots out there!) so there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Computers are now able to learn in the same way that humans do, this will allow massive leaps in the capabilities of AI and thinks back to the increase in data.

Talking the talk

It is apparent that we like talking… a lot! Voice searches via Siri and the like are estimated that, by 2020, 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches, and around 30 percent will involve no screen whatsoever.

This is an astounding statistic, but one that brands need to think about when they are planning their strategies. A lot of businesses will gradually integrate their products with Siri or Alexa - For example, Alexa is being integrated into BMWs from 2018.

2018 is set to be a big year with lots of technological advances, however, the main shift is how customers interact with technology.

This is changing and providing businesses with lots of data to gain real insight into their audience. ‘It’s the incredible explosion in data that has allowed AI to advance so quickly over the last couple of years; the more data an AI system has, the quicker it can learn and the more accurate it becomes’ (Forbes, 2017) - an exciting thought for 2018!