Trends Identified

Continuing presence of instability in the world
The security challenges will remain a key issue for the EU over the next two decades. Structural change in Asia, Latin America, Eurasia, and Africa and particularly the Middle East with unresolved religious, sectarian, and ethnic tensions will continue to generate armed violence, including organised crime and terrorism.
2014
Challenges at the horizon 2025
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)
Continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust
The intelligent digital mesh and related digital technology platforms and application architectures create an ever-more-complex world for security. 20 The continuing evolution of the "hacker industry" and its use of increasingly sophisticated tools — including the same advanced technologies available to enterprises — significantly raise the threat potential. Relying on perimeter defense and static rule-based security is inadequate and outdated. This is especially so as organizations exploit more mobile devices, cloud-based services, and open APIs for customers and partners to create business ecosystems.
2017
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Gartner
Contrabrands
2018 was a good year for the legal cannabis industry but marketers must work hard to shake off weed’s illicit associations.
2018
Most contagious report 2018
Contagious
Convergence
2010
Megatrends
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Converging data architectures
Old approaches to data survive because structured forms of data make IT leaders feel they’re in control. But new approaches to managing unstructured data provide a whole new notion of control—the ability to turn data into new streams of value. Successfully rebalancing the data architecture portfolio and blending the structured with the unstructured are key to unlocking that value.
2012
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Accenture
Conversational Interfaces
While technology like AI or robotics has changed how work is done in the office, in the factory, and in the field, it’s not always easy to use. That’s changing with a new generation of interfaces, such as voice and conversational agents that make it seamless for business users to interact with technology systems, from finance bots and AI-based predictive analytics to smart sensors and factory robots. These interfaces are improving the employee and customer experience and enabling companies to get the full return on their tech investments.
2017
The Essential Eight - Your guide to the emerging technologies revolutionizing business now
PWC
Conversational machine interfaces
Example of Organizationsactive in the area: Apple (US), Amazon (US), Alphabet/Google (US), Microsoft (US).
2018
Table of disruptive technologies
Imperial College London
Conversational Platforms
Conversational platforms will drive the next big paradigm shift in how humans interact with the digital world. They will shift the model from technology-literate people to people-literate technology. The burden of translating intent will move from the user to the computer. The system takes a question or command from the user in natural language. It responds by executing a function, presenting content or asking for additional input.
2017
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Gartner
Conversational Systems and User Interfaces –Talking to Machines
Machine Learning has reached a state in which conversational systems can have increasingly engaging and human like conversations. These chatbots or digital assistants use mainly natural language processing (NLP) to interact with humans but will use sight, sound, tactile, etc. in the near future as well. Conversational systems can be viewed as a step towards true personal virtual assistants and will replace most common interfaces, simplifying human-machine interactions and replacing less interactive interfaces. The technology will probably merge in part with Immersive technologies and will also leverage the digital network of sensors, appliances, and IoT systems to interact with humans. The chatbot ecosystem is already robust, with many different third-party chatbots, native bots, distribution channels, and enabling technology companies. Messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Tencent’s WeChat, Google Allo, Apple iMessage, Slack and Kik all use chatbots as well as voice-controlled consumer devices like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Assistant and SAP Co-Pilot. While the focus is on consumer applications right now, especially based on mobile technologies, chatbots will go business very fast, allowing businesses to leverage the inexpensive and wide-reaching technology to engage with more consumers and to support, simplify and speed-up many business processes. Examples are commerce applications as taxi cab ordering (such as Uber), concierge facilities (such as Sephora), B2B contract workfl ows (such as Apttus), food ordering (such as Domino’s Pizza) and others. Use cases for chatbots are helping humans to use technology without the need to know technology like in navigating and exploring, automated customer services, and supporting functions for hand-busy tasks in fi eld service, logistics, maintenance, medicine and others.
2018
Trend Report 2018 - Emerging Technology Trends
SAP
Core renaissance - Revitalizing the heart of IT
Organizations have significant investments in their core systems, both built and bought. Beyond running the heart of the business, these assets can form the foundation for growth and new service development—building upon standardized data and automated business processes. To this end, many organizations are modernizing systems to pay down technical debt, replatforming solutions to remove barriers to scale and performance, and extending their legacy infrastructures to fuel innovative new services and offerings.
2015
Tech trends 2015 - The fusion of business and IT
Deloitte