Caspar Herzberg |
There are three trends that I believe will reshape business operations in the years ahead:
The resurgence of voice
Voice is going to come back as a method of interacting with vendors, technology and customers. Today is very much about email, text message and chat, but actually the most natural thing for a human to do is speak. As the AI technology around recognising natural language gets better, voice interaction will become mainstream and start to challenge traditional touch and text interfaces. It’s important to understand that this will not be the basic question and response style voice interactions we have today. The developments we’re seeing are fluid, contextual and highly interactive conversations with intelligent systems.
The rise of multi-cloud
As the rise of data usage continues to explode, there’s going to be a bigger shift towards using cloud services for particular applications. As a result, managing workloads across lots of different clouds is going to become commonplace. It is important for businesses to understand the commercial impact of this – they need to get to grips with when they might use a multi-cloud approach both on premise and across public and private clouds. Server-less computing constructs are becoming popular in public cloud and they are very portable. This will drive further competition between public cloud vendors to offer best in class services.
AI and Business Process Automation
‘Intelligent’ software is already being used in a wide range of consumer applications, but in the year ahead we’ll see AI come of age in a business setting, updating businesses processes and transactions in real time. The potential benefits in productivity are huge: it will help enterprises work faster and smarter than they have ever been able to in the past. Teams will be able to focus on their primary business activities servicing customers as relevant contextual data is surfaced to them just in time, rather than entering, searching and updating business data across multiple systems.
Mike Constantine is chief technology officer at GCI