Growing Digital Trends 2017: Expert View
How not to get lost in the stream of digital hots and newcomers? Ask a professional who has been working the way up and actually forms the digital enviroment you deal with today. Seriously, noone knows better.
Unlike UX/UI trends that get all the buzz, digital trends are way more complex and multifaceted and require the opinions of gurus, engineers, innovators, futurists and decision makers to see the broad picture.
This is why at Digiteum we decided to interrogate company founders, data analysts, content strategists, marketers and engineers to see and share what digital brings in 2017 according to the experts’ foresight.
- Michael Grebennikov from Digiteum focuses on artificial intelligence, virtual reality and the power of social media.
- Philip Reimann from Oxford Dictionaries shares his opinion on Internet personalization and multichannel access and touches upon AI and VR as promissing technologies.
- Eddie Vassallo from Entropy puts in “mixed reality” as a “next big thing” in digital.
- Adam Benzecrit from Sportr talks about the opportunities of machine learning and AI-first digital era.
- Simon Spyer from Conduit connects AI and chatbots and mentions blockchain and opportunities these technologies will bring.
- Nigel Gatehouse from Quant Marketing also puts stakes on AI and VR and shares opinion about IoT challenges.
- Roman Gaponenko and Paul Blundell from Satellite75 shift focus on content and “fake news” phenomenon and talk about social media and social data value.
New Ecosystem: Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Social Media
Technologies are so dynamic and develop so rapidly that it becomes a challenge for businesses both to keep up with the pace and make the right choices of approach, strategy, and partnership. In other words, there are more chances to make a mistake because the options are endless.
Michael Grebennikov, co-founder and managing partner at Digiteum, a digital technology agency that helps companies reach their clients through web, mobile and IoT.
What is the next big thing in digital?
It’s hard to single out brand new trends for 2017. Instead, it’s worth to mention the digital technologies that kicked in sometime in 2015 and now are successfully transferring to 2017. Definitely, some begin to sound louder and get a new leap of interest, investment and opportunities.
Artificial intelligence is a great example. The concept of the technology is not new. But the progress and outcomes are too hard to predict.
On one hand, the amount of companies involved into the process of creation has been growing exponentially, and today not only the giants are engaged, but more and more digital engineers nurture AI space.
On the other hand, there’s no doubt that AI will change the world as we know it, both for people and business. It will inevitably create a brand new ecosystem with intelligent everything: processes, connection and communication.
[AI] will inevitably create a brand new ecosystem with intelligent everything: processes, connection and communication.
In consideration with AI, chatbots that are still infants in around 5 years may join the toolkit that will change customer experience and interaction between brands and clients, forever.
Think of virtual reality that is shaping digital space. This is one of the technologies that has already formed a new communication channel and built opportunities for alternative interfaces and enhanced customer experience. More yet to come.
It’s worth mentioning that 2017 will reveal the pragmatic side of social media more clearly. In the end, consumers go on using their Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and communicate through messengers.
For the years to come, networks will be deeper integrated into B2C as marketing and sales channels for businesses. Companies will keep on using messengers and social media apps for business goals, provided that consumers are already connected with brands through these channels.
What digital challenges brands will confront in 2017?
Technologies are so dynamic and develop so rapidly, that it becomes a challenge for businesses both to keep up with the pace and make the right choices of approach, strategy, and partnership. In other words, there are more chances to make a mistake because the options are endless. When it comes to business strategy, wrong choices, unfortunately, often lead to dismal results.
How to find solutions to these challenges?
Through agility. Reasonable flexibility today is a must. It is imposed by the natural flows inside business ecosystems: you need to learn how to be adaptive. When it comes to business strategy, it’s reasonable and already normal to apply flexibility, rethink approach and adjust focus every three years.
Reasonable flexibility today is a must
Access, Language Diversity and Multichannel Interaction
In such a rapidly adapting marketplace it is vital to seek out new partnerships and collaborations to enable organizations to learn quickly and bring new products to market with minimum investment.
Philip Reimann is a product manager at Oxford Dictionaries engaged into licensing at Oxford University Press (OUP), a department of the University of Oxford, which mission is to provide reliable, evidence-based, up-to-date dictionaries.
What do you think is the next big thing in digital?
My hope is that the next big thing in digital will be the increasing access to the Internet for more of the world’s population. Thanks to growing economies, lower cost smartphones, and cheaper infrastructure, waves of new users are coming online. In India alone, the number of mobile internet users grew over 50% in the first half of 2016 over the previous year. For many new users, English won’t be a native or first language, and so services and products will increasingly rely on localization. This is why programs making content available in multiple languages — like Oxford Global Languages — are so important.
Thanks to growing economies, lower cost smartphones, and cheaper infrastructure, waves of new users are coming online.
Augmented and virtual reality will become increasingly relevant and integrated into our interaction with tech. There is huge potential for benefits to education and design, and users can now interact with content in more engaging and often safer ways: surgeons can practice complex procedures, designers can create interactive prototypes, and students can explore long lost cities and species from the comfort of a classroom.
What digital challenges brands will confront in 2017?
Brands are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain control over the environments in which consumers interact with their products and services. Chatbots have seen companies shift to messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger to interact with their customers, and interactions with services have become smaller as users increasingly look to virtual assistants to fulfill basic tasks.
‘Apps’ are slowly being replaced by ‘skills’ as users look to amalgamate their activities into more familiar environments, like chat. The challenge is that all these assistants — Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google Now — are unlikely to talk to each other any time soon.
How to find solutions to these challenges?
In such a rapidly adapting marketplace it is vital to seek out new partnerships and collaborations to enable organizations to learn quickly and bring new products to market with minimum investment. Organizations therefore need to be structured to respond, and this is where APIs offer the required flexibility and modularity to pivot to changing needs.
Next-gen Reality: Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed
“Mixed reality” can add crucial information to the “live world,” enhancing a user’s ability to learn, research, build, and innovate, all without removing them from their actual environment
Eddie Vassallo is a founder & CEO of Entropy, former Head of Mobile for Discovery Channel, regular Guest Contributor on GigaOm featured on Daring Fireball, CNN, and Strategy Eye.
What is the next big thing in digital?
Without a doubt, one of the most important technology trends to prepare for in 2017 will be the re(emergence) of augmented and mixed reality opportunities. I say ‘re-emergence’ as augmented reality has actually been around for a lot longer than most people think. Remember those initial mobile apps in the early 2010’s that allowed you to use your phone’s camera to view a live image of the world around you ‘augmented’ with floating text and animations? For a time these were all the rage for museums, outdoor tour apps, and location-specific solutions (tube maps, bus stops, bike rental points, etc).
The utility and excitement for these initial augmented apps fizzled rather quickly, and the world of “virtual reality” began to take hold with the introduction of the Oculus Rift Developer Edition some 18 months ago.
And while the future is extremely bright for full “virtual reality” (Oculus Rift, Playstation VR, HTC Vive, etc), at Entropy we are seeing a lot more business and enterprise excitement around the emergence of next-gen augmented reality solutions.
Now re-dubbed “mixed reality” we’re seeing some pretty amazing things around Microsoft’s HoloLens product, Google’s Tango initiative, and even less obvious mixed reality products such as audio-enhanced reality coming from the likes of Apple and others.
While virtual reality full transforms the user’s space and perception — the ideal scenario for experiential solutions such as games, museums, and events — mixed reality is much more attractive to businesses and sectors such as manufacturing, education, medical/health, and even retail.
Mixed reality is much more attractive to businesses and sectors such as manufacturing, education, medical/health, and even retail.
We’ve been working extensively with Microsoft and the HoloLens product on a number of solutions in both the retail and manufacturing space — and have a number of projects lined up in education and media where ‘mixed reality’ can add crucial information to the ‘live world’, enhancing a user’s ability to learn, research, build, and innovate, all without removing them from their actual environment.
Obviously, it is still very early days — and virtual reality already has captured the “imagination” of the gaming community. But for businesses planning for the “next big thing” in digital, mixed and augmented reality will be the horse to bet on — both in 2017 and for several years to come.
Machine Learning and AI-first Digital Era
It seems we’re characterised by less of a “mobile-first” digital era but rather an “AI-first” one
Adam Benzecrit is a co-founder of Sportr, content masters that employ AI to automate content creation for a variety of businesses.
What do you think is the next big thing in digital?
Pokémon Go may have peaked our VR interests this year, but it’s been the shift towards machine learning (ML) and other AI technologies that are redefining a new generation of services and products.
ML can be defined as the capacity of a computer to learn from experience, i.e. to modify its processing on the basis of newly acquired information.
Frameworks developed by the big innovators such as Google and Facebook have been open-sourced allowing any sized company to build systems based on them, creating a wide spectrum of ML businesses. An example of these frameworks is TensorFlow, which has opened the door for conversations about building scalable ML techniques. Even in the co-work space I work in businesses span across health tech, legal tech, video surveillance and neural networks, all of which are AI-powered. It seems we’re characterised by less of a “mobile-first” digital era but rather an “AI-first” one.
Closer to my domain though, which is content automation through ML, we’re seeing the growth of cool conversational interfaces designed to provide relevant information to consumers, a field in which Google is credited with having the upper hand. That’s another big field to watch out for next year, I think.
We’re seeing the growth of cool conversational interfaces designed to provide relevant information to consumers
What digital challenges brands will confront in 2017?
ML is a very fast field and the science is extremely niche, so this means impressive talent pools are fundamental. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges for brands will be considering how to work with data scientists and ML businesses to better understand their business. More specifically, in the arena of content marketing, producing enough content is the key challenge identified by UK digital content marketers.
What we do here at Sportr is lower the cost of creating expensive bespoke content by employing AI to automate digital content creation for businesses. By curating content from a range of selected third party sources and social media, we ensure a consistent volume of current content, allowing businesses to keep salient and active.
How to find solutions to these challenges?
For brands, making use of big data creates scary challenges so by working with specialised teams, you will be better positioned to extract meaningful information through pattern recognition to reveal structure, impossible by using conventional algorithms. There’s been a lot of debate recently of how best to structure teams with an AI focus. My response to that would be to work closely with a select few ML businesses that fit well with your commercial objectives and to be on the same page when it comes to KPI tracking.
Blockchain and Personalization through AI
The opportunities and challenges are profound but the brands that are able to leverage each are the ones who will differentiate themselves, deliver great customer experience and, ultimately, succeed
Simon Spyer is a co-founder and managing partner of Conduit, a customer loyalty consultancy that helps senior marketers maximise customer loyalty to deliver remarkable customer experience and commercial results.
What do you think is the next big thing in digital?
Digital is about to be disrupted again by a tidal wave of chatbots, artificial intelligence and blockchain. The opportunities and challenges are profound but the brands that are able to leverage each are the ones who will differentiate themselves, deliver great customer experience and, ultimately, succeed.
Taking each one in turn.
Chatbots are a reality now. They offer marketers the chance to be more responsive than at any other time and the potential of significant cost efficiencies. Critically they don’t rely on consumers installing new apps or software — they will run natively in existing messaging platforms. These platforms are already pervasive, and we expect them to become linchpins between customers and brands in everything from customer service to rewards and marketing fulfilment.
Much has been written about artificial intelligence (AI). We won’t veer into a discussion about ethics and what the future may hold. But machine learning will deliver greater personalisation through the customer journey: the more you interact with a brand the more the platform will learn about you and this knowledge can be deployed to deliver the right content, offers service at the right time through the right channel. We believe that this has the potential to significantly reduce friction at the key ‘moments of truth’ in the customer journey. Delivering this level of personalisation will bond customers to brands like never before.
Machine learning will deliver greater personalisation through the customer journey… this level of personalisation will bond customers to brands like never before.
Finally, less has been made about blockchain outside the fintech world but we believe that its potential is greater than AI. Blockchain is a distributed ledger of transactions between entities — so between companies, between companies and consumers, and indeed in peer-to-peer interactions between consumers. This may sound conceptual but in reality it’s hugely disruptive. In the marketing space we see consumers owning and monetising their personal data and direct relationships with brands that remove the need (and costs) of intermediaries.
What digital challenges brands will confront in 2017?
Well, with these significantly disruptive ‘big’ things emerging and brands already struggling with the realities of ‘digital’, 2017 looks like being a challenge.
Many brands aren’t yet digitally enabled. By this we mean the able to offer holistic customer experiences across multiple channels and truly understand customer’s needs, responses and expectations. Silo’s activities and a departmental view of “digital” is still the norm.
Many brands aren’t yet digitally enabled… Silo’s activities and a departmental view of “digital” is still the norm.
But some brands are getting to grips with (or even surpassing it) and delivering levels of service and experience that customers both want and are starting to demand.
Adding AI, blockchain and so on to this environment will complicate things further. There is a real danger that the majority of brands will end up delivering even more fragmented customer experience and/or not realise the opportunities that these ‘big things in digital’ offer.
How to find solutions to these challenges?
In a world of rapid, continuous change the only option is to relentlessly pursue the fundamentals of good marketing: understand the customer and be very clear on your objectives.
With the explosion in data, marketers have never had as much opportunity to really understand the customer. This means going beyond standard demographics and segmentation to really understand customers’ and prospect’s need and pain points. Few are truly doing this.
Allied with clear business objectives, this should start to develop a clearer vision of the experiences that you wish to deliver and for whom. With this understanding it will be easier to navigate the ever-evolving digital world.
AI, VR and Digital Technologies for Customer Engagement
The IT industry is driving the pace of change this time digitally, but it often struggles to work out how to make it relevant to consumers. This seems to me to be truer than ever, and the digital transformation mountain is just that
Nigel Gatehouse is a Chairman and CEO at Quant Marketing, a global CRM and Data Analytics agency that worked with many large brands to give them strategic direction and insight into their customers’ behaviour with the help of big data.
What is the next big thing in digital?
Virtual Reality (VR) is new and exciting and will be one of the winners in 2017. In the retail environment, both on and offline, there are a myriad of opportunities to enable customers to experience a 3 dimensional view of how products look in a range of environments and really help them make the right choices. There are fast emerging applications in Education, Military, Healthcare, Sport and Entertainment to name a few. It remains to be seen whether having to wear goggles has a 3D TV effect, and stunts the growth and rate of adoption of this exciting technology.
In marketing it seems it’s still early days for Artificial Intelligence. Much of what is claimed as AI is in reality sophisticated analytical modelling but groundbreaking applications such video image recognition pose significant challenges for customer privacy and are likely to be rejected as too intrusive by brands. Chatbots will continue to develop in sophistication and will improve online and call centre consumer experiences.
Marketing will be increasingly focused on Customer Engagement in 2017, and digital technologies will play a large part in this whether it goes through improving recognition wherever customer touches the brand. Integrating and managing both online and offline data will be critical for all brands.
Quant is involved with a number of Smart City projects. These need big upgrades in local network capabilities, IoT installations and connectivity. The big challenge is how they are going to develop compelling service propositions to residents. While some have a vision, these are often high level and lack the granularity that provides convincing arguments for the benefits. All councils are under severe funding pressures and are looking to develop an increasing range of commercial services. Few have worked out how to do this, and this will be a priority in 2017.
Fake News and Evolved Social Technologies
More mature brands will be pushing for a better understanding of the customer journey through social data and that leaves little room for any noise or unreliable data
A digital strategist Roman Gaponenko and interactive and innovation director Paul Blundell are co-founders of Satellite75, a content marketing agency focused on helping clients become effective content marketing organisations.
What do you think is the next big thing in digital?
The year is coming to a close with lots of headlines about “fake news.” For those of us who have been managing digital brand reputations, running social media command centers and training companies to be prepared for crisis, “fake news” is not news. Yet the novelty comes with the apparent flaws in algorithmic content serving and developments in social data analysis.
We have clearly reached a new milestone this year with the US Elections, Brexit vote, numerous cases of cyber attacks and extremist content. The social networks and media are challenged with accountability issues, consumers are barraged with misinformation and brands still hope their reputations will remain untarnished in this complex environment.
Without a doubt, 2017 will be the year when we see social data technologies evolving faster than ever and social media networks taking further steps towards greater control around content published and shared on their platforms.
Tech giants are already trying to change. We see Facebook making its first move to fight fake news. Twitter, Google and Microsoft teaming up to counter extremist content. There is greater proliferation of social media tools and more sophisticated technologies that help extract meaning from the ever growing amounts of social data.
What digital challenges brands will confront in 2017?
The challenge for brands will be in taking control over their digital reputations and content publishing, creating better monitoring systems to plan for both negative and positive outcomes and acquiring tools and processes to conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis of all the content that surrounds them.
Moreover, there will be pressure on the social media networks to keep their inventory free of misinformation and demand for greater control on the part of the brands who pay to promote their content and are not interested in showing up on platforms with questionable quality. Equally, more mature brands will be pushing for a better understanding of the customer journey through social data and that leaves little room for any noise or unreliable data.
How to find solutions to these challenges?
The solution for brands is not just in powerful social data intelligence, which is critical, but also in acquiring expertise that allows social data tracking for audience research, brand analysis, market research and content performance on a much deeper level. Social data is inherently qualitative and requires the eyes of analysts, statisticians, sociologists, anthropologists, editors and public relations practitioners on top the marketing function that tends to own it. The opportunities are greater than ever and so are the risks.
What do you think? Do you have your predictions for digital technology trends in 2017? Comment and share your opinion.
We will keep on updating and add more expert foresights. Follow us here on Medium and visit us on www.digiteum.com.
