These 4 tech trends will transform business this decade

The business world has changed a lot in the last year. As companies moved away from Covid-19 restrictions, they found that a reliance on remote working and online content had grown dramatically, fuelling technological change in the process.

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With 2023 on the horizon, we’re about to see these changes accelerate, with new AI- and VR-powered tools at the forefront of it.

Business leaders and workers could do a lot worse than take note of the following changes, that look set to shape the business world for years to come.

An expansion of hybrid workspaces

Hit by the Great Resignation, a term coined by a UK academic to describe the huge numbers of workers leaving their job due to the pandemic, companies have had to adjust their HR methods.
No longer happy to work in confined office spaces, employees expect to have the option to work from home at least some of the time. A Boston Consulting Group survey of 209,000 workers in 190 countries found that 89% of people wanted the work-from-home option, forcing companies to move towards hybrid workforces.

This will involve moulding teams based on their agility, rather than location. No longer dependent on where their office is, workers will be assigned tasks according to how well they are suited to them and how efficient they can carry them out.

‘On-demand’ workforces could be a product of this new model. With fewer workers based in an office full-time, there will be more emphasis on employing freelancers for specific projects, rather than relying on a core workforce.

Artificial Intelligence

We’ve seen how AI has the power to transform how we do business with sophisticated avatars and chatbots opening up new ways of customer communication, but the technology will also help companies set up new barriers of defence against cyber-attacks.

Internet entities in the financial and entertainment sectors that are most vulnerable to attacks already have significant security measures in place. Take a bank, for example. Modern security methods make it very difficult for a hacker to steal sensitive information. The best online casinos, too, almost always put players through Know-Your-Customer (KYC) security measures.

However, AI will allow them to make these security breaches virtually impossible.

Pattern recognition and predictive analytics will be crucial in identifying anomalies in the early stages and averting large-scale data breaches in the future. It will also be possible to learn and analyse common behavioural patterns between the attacks and stop criminals before irrecoverable damage is done.

Ambient Experience

Ever since the start of widespread Internet use around 20 years ago, human-machine interaction has generally been a 2D process. We type something into a keyboard and see the result on a screen.

Ambient experience is set to replace that. Offering a world behind the glass of a computer screen, it’s set to provide a 3D experience, which we have referred to as Virtual Reality (VR) until now. Ambient experience, though, is a type of unlimited reality: businesses will rely on it to provide training, team building, and remote operations.

The benefits of this will be immense. Staff won’t all have to be in the same place to reap the rewards of these exercises, virtual meetings will have the look and feel of a physical encounter, while workers will be able to operate vehicles and tools remotely.

The next steps may lead to super-simplified communication, where a simple look or gesture could signal the user’s intent and start an exchange of business information. It could also lead to the first smart cities, where participants can carry out complex tasks remotely, without any need for logins or activation steps.

Quantum Technologies

Quantum technologies will soon start to take up bigger roles in day-to-day business life. Previously, quantum technology was in the domain of physicists, however, a race to find ways to use it commercially has started among corporations, governments, and start-ups.

First, unprecedented sets of data can be processed by quantum computers to complete hugely complex tasks in minutes, rather than in years, as would be the case of a conventional computer.

In communication, hyper-sensitive quantum technology will detect hacking attempts immediately, allowing businesses to upgrade their online security at the click of a button.

In the physical world, quantum sensing devices are already in place in some countries. These are super sophisticated tools that are more responsive and more accurate than old-fashioned sensors, and can immeasurably improve services in energy, transportation, and healthcare.

While not even the top scientists know the full potential of quantum technology, they do know that it’s here to stay in a business world fit for the 21st century.