Expect your technology expectations to be both challenged and awed going forward into 2022.
To say that ‘the times they are a’changin’ (to quote Bob Dylan) is a vast understatement by today’s standards. With the continual torrent of technology innovations, the predictions for what’s ahead in 2022 comprise a mix of responses from ‘wow!’, ‘really?’, and ‘no way!’. Let’s take a look.
Most everyone in IT looks to Gartner for insight, so let’s delve into a few excerpts from their 2022 predictions.
Solid business strategy in the coming months will embody a different meaning of resilience. Business models and talent will be the basics of resilience and opportunity and risk will hold an even greater sense of urgency.
Many Gartner predictions are comprised of human-related trends rather than technology expectations, which is not a surprise considering changes over the last few years within the working world.
One of Gartner’s more thought-provoking, predicted trends is that by 2024, 30% of corporate teams will be without a boss because teams will be more self-directed and hybrid in managing the work.
The traditional manager as commander-in-chief of work is seen as a major impediment at a time when team empowerment and autonomy are more important to overall business agility.
The pandemic influenced a shift from central decision-making to peer-to-peer network-based decision-making, seen as a positive which reduces logjams and saves time in a hybrid working environment. As hybrid work continues to flourish, greater efficiency can more easily emerge.
By 2024, personal data will become devalued because 40% of consumers will know how to outwit behavior-tracking metrics.
Because people don’t want to share personal information, they will find new ways to fool companies that want to collect it. Whether motivated by privacy and security concerns, exposure to misinformation. or personal monetary gain, consumers are finding ways to devalue the behavioral data companies.
By 2025, synthetic data impacts personal data collection.
The trend of using data generated by artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, known as synthetic data, is gaining impetus. Synthetic data makes AI truly predictive and the use of high-quality, high-volume synthetic data creates a powerful way to understand humans at scale.
Synthetic data can serve as a substitute for real data, resulting in reduced collection, use, or sharing of actual sensitive information. It allows AI to depersonalize data and synthetic data can be created faster and combined in ways humans might not realize.
By 2027, 50% of people will be raised out of poverty thanks to low-orbiting satellites which will offer network/internet access on a global scale.
Economic opportunity will be made possible for people without previous access to network/internet. The competition is in a dead heat to develop the LEO-based systems that reduce costs of installing cell base stations. This connectivity will impact networking and internet capabilities.
Through 2026, Africa will show an increase of 30% in developer talent helping the area to become a world-leading startup ecosystem, even rivaling Asia in venture fund growth.
Kenya is being called a ‘Silicon Savannah’ with a $1 billion tech ecosystem that offers entrepreneurs, investors, and technologists a space to grow.
In the next three years, informal education channels will contribute to a rise of nearly 900,000 professional developers in Africa. Gartner predicts that as this market continues to grow, global investors will invest less in China in favor of this emerging market.
By 2027, Gartner predicts that 25% of Fortune 20 companies will be replaced by companies that influence subconscious behavior at scale.
No, it isn’t mind control, but rather applying behavioral intelligence and related technology to analyze, understand, and influence human behavior at scale. Mining the subconscious has been around for a long time – think subliminal messaging or MUSAK. The idea is to tap into what motivates people to increase productivity.
Moving into another new year, we at VAZATA understand that inevitably change is the constant. Whether or not that change is insightful, uplifting, cutting edge, or growth-inspired depends on many factors, some of which cannot be predicted, although possibilities prevail.
What we believe to be possible is that business and industry can contribute to a mutually rewarding outcome through collaboration and knowledge-sharing that results in positive change. At VAZATA we look forward to being part of that positive change.