The xLabs Trend Almanac

84 Pages·2017·2.54 MB·English

TREND
ALMANAC
10 Trends presenting the ten most important tech and human trends reshaping your world in 2018.
Blockchain Mixed Reality AI Becomes Setting Robots as
for Truth Mash-ups Emotional Data Free! Colleagues
The era of radical When physical And it’s watching Open everything. And as friends?
transparency. meets digital. you.
Who is in
control?
You or the
algorithm?
Predestination in 2018.
5 xLabs Experts’ Insights
Blockchain for Innovation - AI: Enlightening The Inevitable Does Money
Business Users. The Human USP? a Dark Art. Rise of RegTech. Have a Future?
xLabs Trend Almanac 2018 • 1
Produced by Virtusa xLabs London Studio. © 2018
2 • xLabs Trend Almanac 2018
Prediction is difficult…
especially about the future.
Danish aphorism
TABLE OF
CONTENT
Foreword 04
Executive Summary 06
Place Your Bets 08
Trend Origins 10
Trends By Industry 12
Create Your Innovation Roadmap 72
Themes Index 74
References 76
04 • xLabs Trend Almanac 2018
34
page
16
54
Digital
Predestination
Truth trumps Trust
Upgrading Humans
Blockchain & DLT 20
38
22
The Revolution of 58
the Workspace
Transcendent
No Strings Attached
Realities
42
Engineered Empathy
26 62
Fostering Innovation 46
Computers have Open Everything
50
eyes, mouths and
ears.
Regulation Technologies 66
AI in 2018 30
The Future of Money 68
The Intelligence of
Things
xLabs Trend Almanac 2018 • 05
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Our almanac provides two perspectives:
• The first looks at emerging tech trends
and how these will drive business value.
• The second looks at trends in human
factors; the trends that will reshape the
world for our customers and colleagues
and what they value.
We have considered both of these
perspectives in conjunction because it’s
Any child of the
critical to consider both, the tech and
1980s will remember human perspectives, when deciding where
to invest. Successful innovation projects
the scene from Back
will generate quantifiable business value
to the Future by focusing on the collision point between
emerging tech and the changing world.
in which Biff (the bully) sits in his car flicking
Focusing on technology alone runs the risk
through the 2000 Sporting Almanac,
of creating nice to have toys, rather than
gradually realizing that he has the ability to
must have tools. Focusing on behavioral
successfully bet on any fixture over the next
and cultural factors is equally important.
50 years. Ultimately, the almanac enables
We’ve all heard technologists claiming that
Biff to become wealthy all because of his
they will make a dent in the universe. But
ability to place sure-fire bets.
without keeping track of how the universe
is shifting and reshaping, we run the risk of
As companies enter budget planning
making a dent in where the universe used
season, they also have to make bets about
to be.
where to invest over the coming years.
For those of us investing in emerging
We hope that this year’s xLab Almanac
technologies there is no shortage of advice
proves useful, stimulates debate and sparks
about the next new-new thing. Our in-
ideas. The xLab team were particularly
boxes overflow with PDFs giving insights
drawn to the disruptive Flux Capacitor use-
into the ten technologies that will create
case on page 59.
2018’s unicorns, the five things tech leaders
must do in 2018, and the infinite number
Wishing you great returns on your
of trends shaping the Fourth Industrial
innovation investments,
Revolution. Keeping up with this prediction
torrent is impossible; and there will always
be someone at the next board meeting
Samir Dhir
who has read one more report than you
President of Virtusa
and has a statistic or quote that will derail
the plan you’ve spent nights and weekends
formulating.
We have been in this position ourselves and
thought, “...what if we could create Biff’s
Almanac for the emerging tech sector?”
What if we consolidated a list of the most
probable trends into a digestible document,
enabling you to get a clearer picture of
what’s ahead? This could help you spend
more time enjoying weekends and less
time reading endless tomes on Disruptive
Trends for 2018.
xLabs Trend Almanac 2018 • 07
EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
This year the xLabs Trend Almanac team has combed a mountain
of trend reports to identify the key themes that will appear on
corporate agendas in 2018. Tech-enabled innovation is always a
difficult topic to pitch to the board. Getting traction and funding
depends on identifying the right topic at just the right time.
Finding that Goldilocks point, when tech starts to become more
substance than spin, can makes the difference between being 1. Truth trumps
viewed as an optimistic fairy dust peddler or the slow guy, pitching
“the world of Last Thursday”. Finding that happy middle ground - Trust
the visionary, but viable - depends on getting the right intelligence;
and we hope that this year’s Almanac provides you intelligence and
In Truth trumps Trust we look at the
a little inspiration.
intersection of Blockchain and the post-
truth world, showing how this has created
We have profiled 10 trends, giving examples of early adopter
new ways to address the need for sharing
companies that have already blazed trails in those areas. We have
incontestable facts. We look at how the
also provided our view of which industries will be impacted most
Diamond trade has implementation of
heavily by each trend, which we hope will help you to prioritize
this model to underpin the value of their
your investments.
particular brand of carbon.
Alongside our collation of current thinking, we have also included
five articles from our team. These address questions including:
• Does money have a future?
2. Transcendent
• How will Blockchain deliver better distributed-business models?
• Will Regulatory Tech (RegTech) eliminate the increasing
compliance burden? Realities
• What is Deep Reinforcement Fuzzing and do you need it?
• What should children study to avoid robo-redundancy?
Once there was Physical and Digital, now
the division between the two is blurring
Please feel free to send us any requests for topics you’d like profiled
and concepts such as mixed reality (MR)
in our next report. You can always reach me at [email protected].
mean that companies are re-evaluating
how they deliver real-world experiences.
Transcendent Realities looks at how digital
firms are redefining physical retail, and how
the swelling critical mass of augmented
reality (AR) enabled devices will impact
both customers and colleagues.
08 • xLabs Trend Almanac 2018
8. Upgrading
Humans
3. Computers
Digital therapeutics appears to be creating
an IoP (Internet of Patients), providing a way
have eyes,
to improve or even replace conventional
therapies. Upgrading Humans looks into
mouths and ears
the applications of emerging tech in
medicine and how its providing better
6. Engineered
therapies for conditions ranging from
Computers have eyes looks at the shift from
diabetes to cancer.
screens to sensory interaction and asks
Empathy
how brands that invest millions in brand
ambassadors will cope with Siri being the
It won’t be long until laptops are plastered
voice of their brand (and their competitors’
with stickers proclaiming “Tech has
brands).
feelings too”. You’re picturing the glowing 9. No Strings
Apple logo masked into a twee heart shape,
we know. But should we really care about
Attached
how computers work at an emotional
level? Engineered Empathy looks at the
4. Digital Fostering customer loyalty used to involve
current state of IT’s emotional quotient
giving out green shield stamps. To remain
(EQ), profiling companies using emotion
Predestination relevant, loyalty models now need to reflect
tracking in retail and for fraud prevention.
two paradigm shifts: Power has shifted from
brands to consumers (and the algorithms
If algorithms decide the options that we’re
that feed them). Products are now merely
offered, to what extent do we now have
the starting point for a longer-term service,
real freedom of choice? Aside from being
as the Tesla model has shown. No Strings
a good philosophical discussion, Digital-
7. The Attached looks at this post-loyalty scheme
Predestination looks at the commercial
world and asks how businesses are using
challenges brands face when trying to
Intelligence of tech to foster customer relationships.
position products in a market pre-filtered
by gatekeeper algorithms.
Things
When the IoT meets AI, you end up with a
10. Open
vowel heavy acronym and a way to connect
5. The Revolution things in a self-regulating way. Oversleep
Everything
(smart bed), but still want fresh coffee
(smart-drip). It’s there! Get a variation in
of the Workspace
blood sugar level (wearable), moderate the Open Banking has had the finance
smart insulin pump (connected IV). We industry panicking about the threat of
The Workplace Revolution shows the
always knew that the value of networks disintermediation. What if traditional
evolving relationship between humans and
is driven exponentially by their number banks just become the conduits of data and
robots in the workplace, showing future
of nodes. Adding AI autonomy to IoT, the keeper of funds? APIs and Microservices
models that are more symbiotic than
will produce the Intelligence of Things. don’t just impact the banking industry, so
competitive. We consider how companies
This ultimately removes the bottleneck of how can companies capitalize on this new
will need to change their approach to
human intervention, enabling the Internet spirit of openness and repel the agile and
HR as it becomes HRR (Human & Robot
of Things (IoT) to realize its true potential. aggressive barbarians at the gates?
Relations).
xLabs Trend Almanac 2018 • 09
PLACE
YOUR BETS!
We looked at over 40 reports from analysts, tech companies and
futurologists, evaluating and collating all of the best ideas for you
in this year’s Trend Almanac.
As you can expect, many reports covered the same trends and
provided similar advice. We’ve provided an overview of the major
firm’s trend coverage to help you to sort the ubiquitous usual
suspects from the interesting edge-cases.
y
r
o
t
c
a
f
t
e h
t g
t i
i s
o C e
el w Y or
D P E F
Truth Trumps Trust
Transcendent Realities
Computers Have Eyes, Mouths and Ears
Digital Predestination
Revolution of the Workspace
Engineered Empathy
The Intelligence of Things
Upgrading Humans
No Strings Attached
Open Everything
10 • xLabs Trend Almanac 2018