"Today's engineers find half their knowledge is useless in five years!"
3 Trends in IT We’re Expecting to Boom
Game-changing technologies will continue to transform the way we live and work. Digital trends have become creative solutions to efficiency, transforming the way we communicate, sell, educate, train and innovate. The ever-changing digital landscape will keep allowing organisations to increase their productivity and therefore business results. As current knowledge and skills will become obsolete, it is important for trainers to continuously upskill their staff in IT.
Here are three trends that will continue to grow in the next few years:
AI Technology
A popular trend that will keep rapidly evolving is AI technology. This particular technology utilises a computer system to perform tasks that are normally performed by human intelligence. This includes decision making, speech recognition and visual perception. The AI trend has continued to explode due to the recent developments of virtual assistants. They will increasingly become more readily available with the release of the Google home and Amazon’s Alexa.
There is no doubt that organisations, especially start ups, will use AI technology to reinvent their business models and enhance their decision making processes to become more efficient in their work processes. Soon it will be necessary to gain a competitive advantage in their industry. It is because the value of artificial intelligence is automating both tedious and highly-technical tasks.
Organisations that are thinking ahead are beginning to invest in new and upcoming AI tools, developing efficiencies such as training methods and data preparation. More and more brands, especially in the ecommerce industry are using AI in the form of self-help tools such as chat bots. These aim to improve the customer experience through 24/7 availability and quick responses.
The finance industry will also see a shake-up, where AI systems will be able to take in much more data into account than humans when providing personal financial recommendations through the fast analysis of purchase history, emails, and social posts. AI technology will end jobs in various industries as a consequence, but will create new opportunities and jobs, highlighting the need for reskilling.
Machine Learning
This leads us to our next point – machine learning as an aspect of artificial intelligence has already created many efficiencies in our daily lives. Machine learning involves a computer system that is trained to become better at understanding patterns in data without human intervention.
The algorithms used are iterative, continuously learning and aiming to optimise results. When an error is made, the machine’s algorithms correct the mistake when it begins the repeated process.
Machine learning is being used in both our home and working lives. Daily activities that already utilise machine learning include email spam filtering, anti-virus softwares detecting malicious software, auto-face tagging on Facebook, fraud detection, pattern and image recognition, and even recommendation offers made by Netflix.
Machine learning will only get more advanced and powerful. For example, a recent innovation can be seen in the auto industry, where Audi has used this particular AI to refine self-parking technology.
In this digital age, people consume a high amount of information on a daily basis to feel connected and informed. WIth this being said, the relevancy of journalism has only increased and consumers of news are becoming smarter. This type of technology will not be a threat in terms of replacing journalists as the public still trusts real journalists to write highly emotive human-interest stories as opposed to machines. However, there has been debate regarding how learning systems can help the journalism industry. For example, advanced machine learning can be adopted in content management systems to have better fact-checking technology, and machine translation can allow journalists to do efficient research across languages.
As it quickly produces faster and more accurate results without human intervention, organisations that do not incorporate this particular technology risk falling behind their competitors.
Virtual Reality
Currently, the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) market is young and fragmented. This particular technology creates an artificial environment that is presented to the user, transforming the way we perceive and interact with the digital world. The benefits of this technology has been seen in the gaming industry, such as video games and 360 degree spherical videos. The trend can be seen by the popular app Pokemon Go, which had gained more than 100 million downloads.
As there is great interest in this field, the gaming world is not the only industry where VR technology is gaining traction. There will be more and more developments in the coming years to benefit various sectors such as healthcare and education. VR is also not a new concept in healthcare as psychiatrists for example, use this type of cognitive behaviour therapy to treat patients with anxieties or phobias.
In the education sector, teachers are now providing VR lessons, and are sending their students to virtual field trips. Affordable headsets from Google and Samsung for example are now revolutionising methodologies in educating students, and will increasingly become a more common tool in the classroom. Companies that want to benefit from VR and AR technology need to examine if this specific technology replacing real-life scenarios will become more efficient, and allow their team members to produce better business results.
These three trends in the digital world are here to stay, and will have an enormous impact on our daily lives. It is time to upskill your team members when it comes to emerging technology that can help them with their day-to-day tasks.
Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash
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