Three Nascent Technology Trends That Will Change The Focus of Every Startup

By Ludo Ulrich, Head of Startup Relations, Salesforce

There’s a famous Bill Gates quote about what he feared most from his competition. Rather than name other large tech vendors, he reportedly said, “I fear someone in a garage who is devising something completely new.” That fear turned out to be prescient — when Gates originally said it in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were hard at work in a garage starting what would eventually become one of Microsoft’s biggest rivals.

It’s true that startups have the potential to change the technology landscape and the future of business itself. Here are three areas where the most opportunity exists to breakthrough in the competitive startup landscape.

Productivity and Collaboration

Collaboration is not a new concept, and the “death of email” promised by companies large and small has been mostly exaggerated. The average worker sends and receives 122 emails per day, a number that is expected to grow. Still, we are seeing incredible new innovations that enable employees to connect and collaborate in new ways — whether it’s the stream-of-consciousness provided by Slack or the living documents in Quip.

The emergence of these new methods of collaboration is really just the tip of the productivity iceberg. With deskless offices, remote workers and project-based work becoming the norm, productivity tools are in desperate need of catching up.

A huge opportunity exists to develop business tools that match the way people work today by way of hybrid work structures made possible by new and more dynamic tools. The key to success in this area (and one of the biggest challenges) is to develop tools that are easily adopted by the masses, not just a subset of tech-savvy users. This is where startups can strike now.

Vertical Industry Innovation

Vertical industries — such as government, manufacturing and banking — are ripe for innovation because their proprietary technologies have traditionally been highly specialized and on-premise.

Companies within these industries now have the opportunity to apply cloud, social, mobile, data science and Internet of Things technologies to radically improve the customer experience, as well as increase efficiency and productivity across a wide range of applications. We’re seeing the beginnings of this shift already, as upstart retailers scramble to keep up with Amazon and healthcare providers compete for their patients for the first time, and connected infrastructure provides insight and relief for traffic congestion in cities. However, opportunities abound in banking, manufacturing, the public sector and beyond — many organizations in these industries are, to this day, still very dependent on back-office solutions that are outdated and inflexible. In fact, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that some federal agencies are using systems that are more than 50 years old!

This is a huge opportunity for emerging startups. While it’s crucial they have some domain expertise in the verticals they serve, startups that can provide innovative solutions to these specific business problems will be poised to succeed.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence will soon be like electricity — everyone will require it to operate at full capacity and it will transform every aspect of business — every industry.

As consumers, we are already impacted by AI in ways we don’t even realize, whether it be ad and product recommendations in our social news feeds, autocomplete features at work within our search engines and even self-driving cars. With the technology already ubiquitous, the next step is for startups to begin layering AI into solutions in the business world that already exist.

Integration of AI into productivity, collaboration and vertical-focused technology will be key to supercharging customers and helping them succeed in new ways. AI will also serve as a personal data scientist for modern organizations as it learns from email, calendar, social, CRM, ERP, IoT, etc., while automating tasks and making recommendations in context with business goals.

AI is not just for big companies and totally out of reach, either. Contributing to the democratization of AI by building it into platforms for the benefit of small businesses will translate into much success for budding startups.

Focus Means All The Difference

Entrepreneurs must think about addressing these new technologies and trends when plotting their next great big idea. According to business visionary Steve Case, we are now entering the Third Wave of the internet, where entrepreneurs have the ability to change the way we live by driving transformation through technology. Picking the right areas of focus for innovation can mean the difference between becoming the next Google and never lifting off at all.