Three tech trends we see for 2019
As 2019 moves ahead at a furious pace, our team looked at the emerging tech trends for the year, focusing on what we’re seeing in the market with our partners and clients.
Automation is still important
The challenge of connecting backend systems is still there, and is something we’re hearing from business of all sizes. Technology can bring so many benefits, but if different systems across your business aren’t connected it creates bottlenecks where information cannot flow.
It’s also important in terms of sharing information. With data so important to our businesses these days, ensuring that your team has all the information they need, in a format that works, and at the time they need it, is vital to your ability to deliver for your clients.
In our experience, tackling the problem of disparate systems and information availability can look enormous if you take a whole of business approach, so picking an area to start is the key to being successful. It might be one team, one division, or even one process; distilling the task down to smaller components will make it more manageable. It also has the knock on affect of making it easier to iron out any issues or teething challenges with new technology on a smaller test area, rather than making bigger mistakes that affect a wider component of your business.
Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, robotics
While AI has been a hot topic for some time; I’ve even heard it described as the new ‘electricity’; it’s the technology that will be everywhere! What we’re going to see in 2019 is more technology that takes advantage of the early AI platforms to give us more enriched, usable data. We will see technology that learns processes and tasks and is able to repeat them in more complex ways than we have seen before. And we will see what was once the domain for big businesses with large technology budgets becoming available to smaller businesses.
Lots of businesses already use technology that is powered by AI; think healthcare as an example. What we’ll see in 2019 is a further use in many areas of our daily lives. We’re fast approaching a tipping point where AI based technology is the norm. For business, it creates benefits in terms of operations as well as a commercial opportunity.
Literally any business process can be improved through these new technology platforms. This might be through using AI to make faster decisions on a product design, or to model customer behaviour. The point is that it will make our business smarter and more efficient. From a commercial perspective, it provides opportunities to develop products and services in new ways that deliver better outcomes for clients.
Customer experience first
This has become a trend in business in general but we’re seeing it applied to technology in a number of different ways: How do the projects we’re running provide added benefit to the customer? By ‘customer’ I mean the end customer of our clients.
So much of our office technology is aimed at transforming business; that is, to make it easier to deliver information and processes around an organisation. What we’re seeing is the impact of this trend on projects. Technology that delivers an internal benefit and an end user client benefit has a much greater chance of succeeding.
We’re seeing this with collaboration tools that improve how teams work together, but can also be used to showcase information directly to clients. For example, one real estate client we work with uses one of our SMART tools to be run interactive meetings, while also using the technology to live broadcast auctions to give their clients more choice and convenience.
What other trends are you seeing? Feel free to contact us to discuss.