Your guide to 2019 technology trends.
Here are some of the digital dances that are driving global innovation this year.
William Gibson famously remarked, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” I recently did a research project on 2019 innovation trends, and as part of it I interviewed innovation executives all over the world. Most of them believe that the technologies likely to shape 2019 are already here and available, awaiting wide adoption in innovative products and services.
Innovation is not always about technology, of course. As Jeff Bradley from Aviva put to it me: “Tech is just one way to act on the human imperative.” But we certainly live in an era in which technology is driving much of the innovation happening around us.
I asked the execs I interviewed which of the current technologies (buzzwords?) are driving their thinking today. Their responses are represented in this chart, and I’ve written a brief description of each technology below:
5G
In the past ten years, mobile devices have revolutionized the way in which consumers interact with the internet and digital services. Now a new revolution in connection speeds is about to happen in 2019. The fifth generation of mobile broadband network technology, known as 5G, will have its first phase (release 15) complete next month and will have a significant impact on all applications using mobile data (most people think of this as a consumer mobile phone thing, but I think the even bigger impact will be in embedded device applications such as factory automation, autonomous driving, and remote surgery).
Blockchain
Blockchain continues to be a leading buzzword, although use cases outside cryptocurrency have been slimmer than the hype would suggest, but in 2019 I expect to see use cases blossom. The essential benefit of Blockchain — a distributed ledger with a secure audit trail — is that it can be applied to everything from consumer payments to the provenance of seafood.
Big data
Big data, another leading buzzword the past few years, was mentioned by many of the interviewees I talked with, but execs are less interested in collecting more data today (we’re all drowning in data) and more interested in getting better at finding insights in data that can help inform their innovation efforts.
Voice
30 years ago, computers were machines that humans interacted with via keyboard and command line. Then came the mouse and the “point-and-click” revolution, followed by touch screens. Today, voice has become a legitimate software interface, and consumer products such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa provide the ability to control a wide range of home control and entertainment devices through open API’s. Additional contexts for using Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) include TV remotes, computers, cars, wristwatches, and other wearables.
At the big Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January of 2019, voice assistants (Amazon Alexa and Google Home) occupied huge show real estate, and the fact that both companies have opened-up their voice engines to developers will likely mean a proliferation of additional use cases for voice as a software interface in 2019 and beyond.
AR/VR
AR or Augmented Reality, refers to the digital augmentation or enhancement of real-time human experience in a specific context. AR can also help deliver high resolution modeling capabilities in a variety of design applications, from architecture to consumer products. VR or Virtual Reality refers to an immersive and completely digital experience. It can be delivered through a specialized headset or other display technology for full sensory effect, or, for example, experienced as a virtual walk-through of modeled architectural or retail space. In 2019 we will see more use cases outside of gaming.
IoT
The Internet of Things, or IoT, refers to the networking of devices and the communication of data among these devices. In the consumer products market, this includes appliances, sensors, home control gear, wearables, and other devices. In commercial applications, IoT devices include everything from field sensors in agriculture, manufacturing equipment, medical devices, cameras, large system components, and so on. As I mentioned above, I believe 5G will drive IoT this year, as broadband comes to everything.
AI/Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence is a discipline that has been around since the earliest days of computer science (not to mention the earliest days of science fiction) but in the past two years we have seen practical applications of AI flourish. Partly this is because of the newer field of Machine Learning, which recognizes that computers are better at being “intelligent” if we can teach them to learn.
One way to understand this distinction is with the classic software engineering problem of teaching a computer how to recognize a cat — a very time-consuming process requiring teams of software engineers to write lots of code about what a whisker looks like, what cat ears look like, or how a cat is different from a raccoon, and so on. The machine learning paradigm is to give the computer 100,000 pictures of cats and say “you figure it out.”
Across a range of industries, AI and machine learning will be transformative in 2019.
Chatbots
Combining AI and the human love of chatting, chatbots provide human-like text- or voice-based interactions in toys, human resources and customer service applications, and social apps to help users communicate, solve problems, answer questions, or find information. Leveraging gains in machine learning and AI, chatbots can enhance a user’s experience and improve the quality of engagement by learning from their interactions over time with human users. In 2019 many customer services front-ends will be via AI-driven chatbots.
Edge computing
Edge computing is the distribution of application components or services to separate nodes in a cloud environment so that these services are closer to sources of data or other elements of a distributed system. For example, edge computing helps reduce latency for end users by distributing key components of an application to regional centers that serve a specific geographic locus. As mentioned above, 5G will be a driver for this.
Factory 4.0
Factory 4.0 is a term used to encapsulate the fourth generation transformation of manufacturing process and technology to incorporate AI, machine learning, IoT, and autonomous systems. The “smart factory” incorporates these technologies to improve efficiency, quality, and lower costs.
Low earth orbit satellites
There’s a revolution happening in space. Once the exclusive province of NASA, space is now served by private companies ranging from SpaceX to Planet. Associated with this this new space gold rush, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites will become far more numerous in coming years. Low earth orbits have an altitude of 2000 km or less. Most satellites, including the ISS, orbit in the LEO space. LEO satellites are cheaper to deploy, service, and to decommission. They also require less power to communicate and deliver less latency in their transmissions. Large numbers of LEO satellites are expected to be deployed in coming years chiefly to provide Internet services to remote regions of the planet.
Because LEO satellites see less of the planet due to their low orbit, a distributed swarm of such LEO satellites is required to provide total coverage of the Earth’s surface. In addition to satellites, thousands of pieces of space debris are also orbiting in LEO space, which is cause for some concern. Collisions could add to the debris field and compound the risk of disabling or destroying satellites orbiting in the same plane.
Security
While not a technology, per se, security concerns are driving many initiatives in tech today. The publicity surrounding data breaches at T-Mobile, Orbitz, Marriott, Target, and many more, have brought security to the forefront for many consumers. This was compounded by the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, as well as other security breaches in the private and public sectors. This is largely a best-practices issue (both both consumers and companies) but it’s also an issue with regard to the way digital products and platforms are architected and the way in which companies communicate policies internally and externally. There are significant waves of innovation happening in the areas of automated threat detection, encryption, and
much more.
Automated Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)
Self-driving cars have received most of the publicity, but Level 5 (complete automation) is still on the horizon somewhere. Meanwhile, some form of ADAS is now being installed on most new cars and aircraft. The technologies that drive ADAS systems (LiDAR, radar, image processing, computer vision, and in-car networking) have seen tremendous innovation and advancement, and we expect this entire field will continue to grow and expand in coming years.
Quantum computing
Quantum computing is in the early stages but has the potential to allow scientists to simulate incredibly complex scenarios and solve problems that would otherwise take decades of compute time. Computers as we know them today are binary digital electronic devices based on transistors and capacitors. Quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits, which can be in superpositions of states (instead of only two definite states, 0 or 1) and will represent a step change in computing power for many kinds of applications.
Stack Stitching
Building software applications has always required teams of coders — software engineers. But we’re entering a new era now where creating new software applications (or just creating quick prototypes) is less about writing new code and more about stitching together the incredibly powerful code libraries and services that already exist.
A gifted stack stitcher can create powerful applications that involve deep technology such as AI, machine learning, voice, and image recognition by stitching together powerful services from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and others. This dramatically improves time-to-market and reduces the coding time required to build and launch a new comprehensive product. This also represents a step-change in the development of innovative new products that have a software component. The entire software development paradigm will change. The conventional paradigm of one domain expert and a team of coders will evolve to become a team of domain experts and a few brilliant stack stitchers (see a deeper piece on this).
OK, there’s your buzzword guide for 2019. There’s amazing innovation happening all over the world today, and these are some of the technologies that are driving it. You can download a PDF of my full 2019 Global Innovation Trends Report here.
Illustrations by Emilija Tanelova Milosevic
