Have you ever wondered what is the next big technology that will disrupt the market?
Or perhaps you are interested in tracking technology landscape to spot any major technology breakthrough or new upcoming technology.
Big corporates have their own research team and also take help from consulting firms like McKinsey, Deloitte etc. But you as a professional/ business leader, how can you track the technology landscape at a broader level on your own? Let’s find out in this article.
I have been privy to exclusive strategy level conversation of multinational corporations#. In my experience, I have learned that there are many tools, research reports available online for free that can help us to track the technology landscape. One of the important tools is Gartner Hype Cycle.
Clients use Hype Cycles to get educated about the promise of an emerging technology within the context of their industry and individual appetite for risk.
– Gartner
A Hype Cycle has 5 phases as shown below. As per research, every technology or a concept goes through this kind of life cycle. As a business leader or professional at any level, one should be aware of any emerging technology that can disrupt the market.
If you want to be an early adopter of any technology, then you should focus on technologies that are about to reach ‘Peak of inflated expectations‘. If you are risk averse and only wanted to bet on market tested technologies, then you should focus at ‘Plateau of productivity’.
Most Popular Hype Cycles
Most Popular Hype cycles are- Emerging Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Workplace Hype Cycle. Let’s take a look at some of them. 2023 Hype Cycle is not yet released, but we can get good insights looking at 2022 cycle to find some emerging trends.
What are some important themes to read from the above graph for a business leader?
Theme 1: Evolving/expanding immersive experiences, enhances CX (Customer Experience)
Theme 2: Accelerated AI automation
Some of the fast-developing technologies that would reach plateau of productivity faster (2-5 years)-
- Causal AI– It identifies and utilizes cause-and-effect relationships to go beyond correlation-based predictive models and toward AI systems that can prescribe actions more effectively and act more autonomously.
- Cloud sustainability is the use of cloud services to achieve sustainability benefits within economic, environmental and social systems.
- Non-fungible token (NFT)
- Dynamic risk governance (DRG) is a new approach to the critical task of defining the roles and responsibilities for risk management. DRG customizes risk governance appropriately to each risk, enabling organizations to better manage risks and lower the cost of assurance.
- Open Telemetry is a collection of specifications, tools, application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) that describe and support the implementation of an open-source instrumentation and observability framework for software.
Research report from Big 4: Other sources of technology landscape tracking
Other than the Hype Cycle, you should also look at market research reports released by consulting firms like Deloitte, McKinsey etc. Many a times they released a part of the full report and sometimes the full report as pdf version online. One can leverage that easily. For example, I searched in Google – ‘latest technology trends report pdf’ and I have got report from McKinsey, Deloitte and more. one of the important pages from Deloitte is given below and link to the report is given in the reference section below.
The above picture shows how technology has evolved over last 14 years. it has too m any information, but if you focus on the right part of it, in 2023 timeline, it speaks about major emerging technology themes and AI is one of them.
Conclusion
Intention of this article is to bring forth some avenues to track technology for common folks. Hope this article helps you in some way. Please comment, leave your suggestions and share this article with others. Also, these days we are hearing a lot about Artificial Intelligence and Gartner has a focused AI Hype Cycle. I am giving you a snapshot of the AI Hype cycle, but it is not in purview of this article to go through it. If you want me to write an article specifically for the AI hype Cycle, please leave your comment.
#I have worked for 3-4 major corporations. This article is based on my past experiences and not related to my current position or company.
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