Trends Identified
AI-fueled organizations
For some organizations, harnessing artificial intelligence´s full potential begins tentatively with explorations of select enterprise opportunities and a few potential use cases. While testing the waters this way may deliver valuable insights, it likely won’t be enough to make your company a market maker (rather than a fast follower). To become a true AI-fueled organization, a company may need to fundamentally rethink the way humans and machines interact within working environments. Executives should also consider deploying machine learning and other cognitive tools systematically across every core business process and enterprise operation to support datadriven decision-making. Likewise, AI could drive new offerings and business models. These are not minor steps, but as AI technologies standardize rapidly across industries, becoming an AI-fueled organization will likely be more than a strategy for success—it could be table stakes for survival.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
NoOps in a serverless world
We have reached the next stage in the evolution of cloud computing in which technical resources can now be completely abstracted from the underlying system infrastructure and enabling tooling. Cloud providers are continuing to climb the stack; rather than simply providing everything from the “hypervisor on down,” they are now—through their own focus on hyper-automation—taking on many core systems administration tasks including patching, backup, and database management, among others. Together, these capabilities create a NoOps environment where software and software-defined hardware are provisioned dynamically. Going further, with serverless computing, traditional infrastructure and security management tasks can be fully automated, either by cloud providers or solution development teams. Freed from server management responsibilities, operations talent can transition into new roles as computing farm engineers who help drive business outcomes.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
Connectivity of tomorrow
Advanced networking is the unsung hero of our digital future, offering a continuum of connectivity that can drive the development of new products and services or transform inefficient operating models. Increasingly, digital transformation through data and networking-dependent technologies such as cognitive, IoT, blockchain, and advanced analytics are fueling adoption of connectivity advances. Next-generation technologies and techniques such as 5G, low Earth orbit satellites, mesh networks, edge computing, and ultra-broadband solutions promise order-of-magnitude improvements that will support reliable, high-performance communication capabilities; software-defined networking and network function virtualization help companies manage evolving connectivity options. In the coming months, expect to see companies across sectors and geographies take advantage of advanced connectivity to configure and operate tomorrow’s enterprise networks.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
Intelligent interfaces
Today, people interact with technology through ever more intelligent interfaces, moving from traditional keyboards to touchscreens, voice commands, and beyond. And even these engagement patterns are giving way to new and more seamless and natural methods of interaction. For example, images and video feeds can be used to track assets, authenticate individual identities, and understand context from surrounding environments. Advanced voice capabilities allow interaction with complex systems in natural, nuanced conversations. Moreover, by intuiting human gestures, head movements, and gazes, AI-based systems can respond to nonverbal user commands. Intelligent interfaces combine the latest in humancentered design techniques with leading-edge technologies such as computer vision, conversational voice, auditory analytics, and advanced augmented reality and virtual reality. Working in concert, these techniques and capabilities are transforming the way we engage with machines, data, and each other.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
Beyond marketing: Experience reimagined
The new world of marketing is personalized, contextualized, and dynamic. Increasingly, this world is orchestrated not by outside parties but by chief marketing officers partnering with their technology organizations to bring control of the human experience back in-house. Together, CMOs and CIOs are building an arsenal of experience-focused marketing tools that are powered by emerging technology. Their goal is to transform marketing from a customer acquisition-focused activity to one that enables a superb human experience, grounded in data. In experiential marketing, companies treat each customer as an individual by understanding their preferences and behaviors. Analytics and cognitive capabilities illuminate the context of customers’ needs and desires, and determine the optimal way to engage with them. Experience management tools tailor content and identify the best method of delivery across physical and digital touchpoints, bringing us closer to truly unique engagement with each and every human.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
DevSecOps and the cyber imperative
To enhance their approaches to cyber and other risks, forward-thinking organizations are embedding security, privacy, policy, and controls into their DevOps culture, processes, and tools. As the DevSecOps trend gains momentum, more companies will likely make threat modeling, risk assessment, and security-task automation foundational components of product development initiatives, from ideation to iteration to launch to operations. DevSecOps fundamentally transforms cyber and risk management from being compliance-based activities—typically undertaken late in the development life cycle—into essential framing mindsets across the product journey. Moreover, DevSecOps codifies policies and best practices into tools and underlying platforms, enabling security to become a shared responsibility of the entire IT organization.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
Reality check
Last year saw a record jump in optimism regarding global growth prospects in 2018, and this exuberance translated across regions. This year, by contrast, saw a record jump in pessimism, with nearly 30% of CEOs projecting a decline in global economic growth, up from a mere 5% last year. CEOs also reported a noteworthy dip in confidence in their own organisations’ revenue prospects over the short (12-month) and medium (three-year) term. If CEOs’ confidence continues to be a leading indicator, global economic growth will slow down in 2019.
2019
22nd Annual global CEO survey
PWC
Look inside-out for growth
Across the survey rang a general theme of hunkering down as CEOs adapt to the strong nationalist and populist sentiment sweeping the globe. The threats they consider most pressing are less existential (e.g. terrorism, climate change) and more related to the ease of doing business in the markets where they operate (e.g. overregulation, policy uncertainty, availability of key skills, trade conflicts). When asked to identify the most attractive foreign markets for investment, CEOs are narrowing their choices and expressing more uncertainty.
2019
22nd Annual global CEO survey
PWC
Mind the information and skills gaps
In addition to the fault lines developing geopolitically, CEOs are working to bridge the gaps in their own capabilities. Organisations are struggling to translate a deluge of data into better decision making. There is a shortage of skilled talent to clean, integrate, and extract value from big data and move beyond baby steps toward artificial intelligence (AI). One of the more striking findings in this year’s survey was the fact that — despite billions of dollars of investment1 and priority positioning on the C-suite agenda — the gap between the information CEOs need and what they get has not closed in the past ten years.
2019
22nd Annual global CEO survey
PWC
The center of economic gravity is shifting east and south, propelled by high-growth emerging economies and globally competitive companies
Emerging economies led by China and India have accounted for almost two-thirds of global GDP growth and more than half of new consumption in the past 15 years. Among emerging economies, our research has identified 18 high-growth “outperformers” that have achieved powerful and sustained long-term growth—and lifted more than one billion people out of extreme poverty since 1990. Seven of these outperformers—China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand—have averaged GDP growth of at least 3.5 percent for the past 50 years. Eleven other countries (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Kazakhstan, Laos, Myanmar, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam) have achieved faster average growth of at least 5 percent annually over the past 20 years. Underlying their performance are pro-growth policy agendas based on productivity, income, and demand, and often fueled by strong competitive dynamics. The next wave of outperformers now looms as countries from Bangladesh and Bolivia to the Philippines, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka adopt a similar agenda and achieve rapid growth. The dynamism of these economies has gone hand in hand with the rise of highly competitive emerging-market firms, which are increasingly taking on incumbents in advanced economies. On average, outperformer economies have twice as many companies with revenue over $500 million as other emerging economies. In addition to driving economic growth at home, they now play a disproportionately large role on the global stage: while they accounted for only about 25 percent of the total revenue and net income of all large public companies in 2016, they contributed about 40 percent of the revenue growth and net income growth from 2005 to 2016. More than 120 of these companies have joined the Fortune Global 500 list since 2000, and by several measures, they are already more innovative, nimble, and competitive than Western rivals. For example, our surveys show that they derive 56 percent of their revenue from new products and services, eight percentage points more than their peers in high-income economies, and make important investment decisions six to eight weeks faster. They can also earn better returns for investors. Between 2014 and 2016, the top quartile of outperformer companies generated total return to shareholders of 23 percent on average, compared with 15 percent for top-quartile firms in highincome countries (Exhibit 1).
2019
Navigating a world of disruption
McKinsey