Our predictions for tech in 2017
The Founders Factory operations team share some of their thoughts on the tech industry for the year ahead.
Dan Kolodziej, Product Manager:
“We’ll start to see more ‘intelligent’ drones and other physical products. Basically further convergence between AI, robotics and IoT.”
Jeffrey Ng, Chief Scientist
“Large corporations will pool their data (yield management) for cities- we’ll predict what will happen in London in say 6–12months time. Also, AI Assistants are going to become cleverer with natural language advances and customer intent engines.”
Tomáš Ruta, Growth Marketing
“Industries selling highly commoditized services like travel, will see an emergence of a new wave of disruptors, whose products will be native to the new user acquisition channels (messenger platforms/bots, Snapchat etc).”
Hannah Blake, Business Development Lead
“I believe we’ll see marketing departments begin to reevaluate SEO and other traditional marketing techniques as customers begin to search by voice as well as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google battling out to be the AI assistant of choice. With the poor stats on app usage and the opportunity that AI brings, I think we’ll see brands increasingly experimenting with personal assistant services.”
Phil Caudell, Product Lead
“Augmented audio is the one to watch. Devices like Apple’s AirPods means you’ll have an always in, unobtrusive, earpiece and microphone. It won’t be long before we see more apps take advantage of this.”
Si Dhanak, Product Manager
“Firstly, one tangible trend we’ll see in 2017 is massive acceleration in bluetooth wireless accessories (headphones, watches, etc.) as industries catchup with Apple’s ditching of the headphone jack and people approach their phone upgrade cycle.
“Secondly, voice will probably edge further into the high 90%s accuracy so expect to see way more people interacting primarily through voice as their computer interface for getting things done.”
Farah Kanji, Head of Recruitment
“We will start to see fierce competition for hiring growth marketers similar to technical and product hires. I predict that growth marketers will become one of the toughest hires to make in 2017.”
Steve Lloyd, Recruitment
“RegTech” is one to watch as it will disrupt documentation in general but especially within the legal sector. Machines will read and interpret documents better, reducing the need for legal specialists.”
Darius Meadon, Head of Brand
“More new startups will start thinking about great product-market fit and also about making the world a better place. My prediction is that tech will become more altruistic in 2017.”
Paul Egan, CTO
“As machine learning frameworks & services are commoditized, the application of AI will become so ubiquitous that it’ll no longer be a distinguishing feature to talk of an ‘AI business’, much like these days we don’t talk about a “database business”.
Vanessa Gstettenbauer, Senior Investment Manager
“Voice, voice, voice! We’ll start to see what’s possible if there is no friction from having to open specific apps anymore and products simply talk to us or message us.”
Justus Brown, Head of Product
“Tools for building great experiences will continue to democratize. Think chatbot frameworks, automated deployment / setup of backends, Swift for iOS apps etc. It’s getting easier for startups to compete as the technology stacks get more mature.”
David Hickson, Head of Corporate Development
“‘Chatbots and the disappearing interface’ is my top prediction for 2017. For this reason, fitness app FitWell is one to watch this year. Maybe one of the secrets to the success of chatbots will be the removal of the friction provided by screens and apps i.e. when we no longer need to access a service or product via a website or app, because we can just talk to it, what might that mean for (for example) products that have suffered retention problems because its been too hard to jump from app to app. Therefore, the winners in the year ahead will be those services/products that are more naturally fitted to an interface that is all oral.”
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