Trends Identified
The Quantum Leap
Long the domain of science fiction and theory, quantum computing looks poised to outperform traditional supercomputers and achieve supremacy in 2018. Competitors in the space are aggressively racing to increase their qubit computing power, while minimizing the potential for errors. Experimentation of quantum computing in conjunction with encryption, AI, materials, and qubit generation will be key areas of focus in 2018. Be ready to hear “Quantum” as the next buzz word.
2018
Top 10 Tech Trends For 2018
Forbes
The promise (and reality) of social data
Organizations have long heard about the benefits of deep listening and uncovering customer insights with social data. But they’ve also realized that integrating social data with other analytics systems—or finding usable insights from mountains of social mentions—requires a lot of work and more resources than they originally thought. In 2018, the promise of social data remains—but organizations will need to recalculate the effort and resources they’ll need to invest to turn social data into a true source of customer insights that can be used across the enterprise.
2018
Social media trends 2018
Hootsuit
The Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction
Access to technology that enables the production and distribution of WMD is likely to increase. Many states will feel that they require the prestige and deterrent value of WMD systems to reinforce their regional power.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
The productivity imperative
Developed-world economies will need to generate pronounced gains in productivity to power continued economic growth. The most dramatic innovations in the Western world are likely to be those that accelerate economic productivity.
2010
Mckinsey quarterly, Global forces: An introduction
McKinsey
The primacy of purpose
Today’s brands must be purposeful and provide the services customers want while fulfilling steep demands for accountability and transparency. The business model of the future will require giving back—to employees, to communities, and to the planet.
2018
Trend watch 2018: the next five
Landor
The political lifestyle
Pepsi practically invented life- style marketing in 1963, when it struck upon the idea for the Pepsi Generation, and the brand has been distilling the essence of youth into its ads ever since. In previous years, this involved montages of clean-cut teens cavorting at swimming holes and collaborations with the Spice Girls, but in 2017 Pepsi decided it meant protests and social conscience.
2018
Most contagious
Contagious
The Platform (R)evolution: Defining ecosystems, redefining industries
Among the Global 2000, digital industry platforms and ecosystems are fueling the next wave of breakthrough innovation and disruptive growth. Increasingly, platformbased companies are capturing more of the digital economy’s opportunities for strong growth and profitability. Rapid advances in cloud and mobility not only are eliminating the technology and cost barriers associated with such platforms, but also are opening up this new playing field to enterprises across industries and geographies. In short: platform-based ecosystems are the new plane of competition.
2015
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Accenture
The pace of working poverty reduction is slowing
Similarly, the global labour market has seen only weak progress in the area of working poverty. In 2017, extreme working poverty remained widespread, with more than 300 million workers in emerging and developing countries having a per capita household income or consumption of less than US$1.90 (PPP) per day. Overall, progress in reducing working poverty is too slow to keep pace with the growing labour force in developing countries, where the number of people in extreme working poverty is expected to exceed 114 million in 2018, or 40 per cent of all employed people.
2018
World Employment and Social Outlook
International Labour Organization (ILO)
The pace of technological progress is accelerating, bringing significant opportunities to create value even as it redefines the future of work
Digital technologies have been reinventing the way we live, work, and organize. Smartphones, the mobile internet, e-commerce, and cloud-based services have opened the door to more mobility and convenience as well as to greater competition. Businesses have been harnessing advanced analytics and the Internet of Things to transform their operations, and those in the forefront reap the benefits: companies that are digital leaders in their sectors have faster revenue growth and higher productivity than their less-digitized peers. They improve profit margins three times more rapidly than average and are often the fastest innovators and the disruptors of their sectors. The forces of digital have yet to become fully mainstream, however. On average, industries are less than 40 percent digitized, despite the relatively deep penetration of these technologies in media, retail, and high tech. Now comes the next wave of innovation, in the form of advanced automation and artificial intelligence (AI). An explosion in algorithmic capabilities, computing capacity, and data is enabling beyond-human machine competencies and a new generation of systemlevel innovation. Machines already surpass human performance in areas like image recognition and object detection, and these capabilities can be used to diagnose skin cancer or lip-read more accurately than human experts. Combining these capabilities is leading to system-level innovation, for example the driverless car, which takes advantage of innovations in sensors, LIDAR, machine vision, mapping, satellites, navigation algorithms, and robotics. Our research finds that companies in the forefront of adopting AI are likely to increase employment rather than reduce it, as innovationfocused adopters position themselves for growth, which tends to stimulate employment. These technologies still have limitations, and deployment can be complex. Nonetheless, productivity gains across sectors are already visible, with AI use cases in functions such as sales and marketing (e.g., “next product to buy” personalization), supply chain and logistics, and preventive maintenance. Our analysis of more than 400 use cases across 19 industries and nine business functions found that AI could improve on traditional analytics techniques in 69 percent of potential use cases. Deep learning could account for as much as $3.5 trillion to $5.8 trillion in annual value, or 40 percent of the value created by all analytics techniques (Exhibit 3). For the global economy, too, AI adoption could be a boon. A simulation we conducted showed that AI adoption could raise global GDP by as much as $13 trillion by 2030, or about 1.2 percent additional GDP growth per year. AI could also contribute to tackling pressing societal challenges, from healthcare to climate change to humanitarian crises; a library of social good use cases we collected maps to all 17 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Yet AI is not a silver bullet. Significant bottlenecks, especially relating to data accessibility and talent, will need to be overcome, and AI presents risks that will need to be mitigated. It could introduce or exacerbate social challenges, for example through malicious use or abuse, bias, privacy invasion, or lack of transparency.
2019
Navigating a world of disruption
McKinsey
The Outcome Economy: Hardware producing hard results
Intelligent hardware is bridging the last mile between the digital enterprise and the physical world. As leading enterprises come face-to-face with the Internet of Things, they are uncovering opportunities to embed hardware and sensors in their digital toolboxes. They are using these highly connected hardware components to give customers what they really want: not more products or services, but more meaningful outcomes. These “digital disrupters” know that getting ahead is no longer about selling things—it’s about selling results. Welcome to the “outcome economy.”
2015
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Accenture