First of all, the Valorem Reply Research & Incubation team would like to wish you a Happy New Year! Like we wrote in our 2021 recap, last year has brought further resilience and acceleration of digital transformation and for 2022, we are looking forward to more innovations in various digital transformation areas with disruptive, intelligent technology that will not only impact how frontline workers execute their work but also how office workers move forward in this hybrid-work world.
Just like last year, we are going to highlight the 10 most promising emerging technology trends of this year in this blog post. This is based on market research from Forrester, our own internal market research group and of course our pulse of the industry and expert knowledge. We will pay close attention to the following topics and we will cover them in more detail in 2022 along with our Reply colleagues around the globe:
1. Robotics and Automation
2. Smart Spaces
3. Enterprise Metaverse
4. Digital Humans
5. Total Experiences (TX)
6. Democratization of AI
7. Edge AI and IoT
8. Generative AI
9. Homomorphic Encryption
10. Quantum Machine Learning
1. Robotics and Automation
The topic of Robotics is not new and has been steadily growing in the manufacturing and healthcare industry ever since more intelligent automation took off many decades ago. A lot of the robotics systems seen today are mainly hard-to-program stationary robots like robotic arms for welding, etc. The trend now goes into making these easier to program with machine teaching and getting these stationary robots on the move, which we see more and more with autonomous mobile robots (AMR). Predictions say that by 2030, 75% of the robots shipped worldwide will be mobile (6 out of 8 million). The Reply Network is at the forefront of this trend, being part of a few selected companies in the Boston Dynamics Early Adopter Program for the SPOT robot dog, which has been applied to interesting challenges with our clients. We also announced our deeper partnership with Microsoft and the reference architecture for autonomous mobile robots. Stay tuned for more exciting news this year.
2. Smart Spaces
IoT and Digital Twins have been an ongoing topic for the manufacturing sector but now they are also entering retail, utilities sector, automotive and many other industries and their consumers. The topic becomes even more interesting with the bigger picture of Smart Spaces which market research companies also feature for their trends to watch closely. Smart Spaces are physical or digital places and locations with interconnected sensors to give owners, occupants and managers better information and how the system is leveraged. Smart Cities is a flavor that is often discussed where whole cities become smarter and allow for more resource sensitive usage. Smart spaces offer a great way across industries whenever traffic, people, robots and other machines require analytics and efficient management. Smart Spaces also tie into the Real-World Metaverse technology allowing to add a smart, digital layer on top of the world.
Figure 1: IoT and more can even turn old buildings into smart spaces. (Source: https://www.reply.com/en/topics/augmented-and-virtual-reality/metaverse
3. Enterprise Metaverse
Spatial Computing is a favorite topic of our R&I team and we have been creating content around it for quite some time and will continue the journey, as it is still very much an emerging technology that will change how we interact with computers and the world. Mainly driven by AI computer vision and advanced sensors, devices can sense the physical world and provide more precise context for Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality (AR/VR/MR) scenarios. Valorem Reply is a long time Microsoft Mixed Reality partner, and our experienced team developed many innovative solutions gaining ROI for our clients.
In 2021 a 30-year-old terminology gained new traction and became top of mind for many business leaders: The Metaverse. We also looked at the whole topic from a 10000-foot view in our November 2021 article and also mentioned the potential benefits for professional users with the Enterprise Metaverse. There’s currently a lot of hype and potentially a bit too much hype in particular on the decentralization web3 aspect of the Metaverse with NFTs. Aside from this overhype, we believe there’s real potential in web3 and the Metaverse, that will enable new beneficial experiences not just for consumers but also for corporations with their own branded Corporate Metaverse spaces. Another interesting flavor is the Real-World Metaverse, the AR Cloud, essentially a Digital Twin of our world, a digital content layer that is persisted and mapped to real objects and locations in the physical world. Virtual content can be anchored in the real-world, shared cross-platform, between platforms and over time.
It’s just the beginning of the Metaverse with the puzzle pieces of AI, Spatial Computing and decentralized protocols like blockchain becoming mature enough. We are deeply committed to this and recently launched a Metaverse landing page as we expect to see more gain this year, just like Forrester and the rest of the world are expecting huge growth opportunities here. For example Bloomberg predicts "The global Metaverse revenue opportunity could approach $800 billion in 2024 vs. about $500 billion in 2020”. Therefore, it’s no surprise that all large tech companies and many startups are working in this space, and we have been leveraging those since their early preview to develop custom solutions for our customers. We also shared our learnings and best practices at various international conferences including a recent TV interview during the special new year show of Arirang TV “2022: Year of the Virtual Renaissance”. Together with other experts I talked about Spatial Computing like AR, VR, the Metaverse, AI and more. Arirang did a great job with the show, and it's worth watching to learn more about these topics going into 2022. Arirang TV is an English-speaking South Korean TV station airing in 101 countries reaching 150 million households. The show was originally broadcasted on Friday January 14th, 2022, at 8PM KST.
4. Digital Humans
We wrote about the Digital Twin of the Person in the context of COVID-19 vaccination certificates, other healthcare aspects and relevant usage for a digital human virtual presence. Metaverse worlds rely on users and their presence usually in the form of an avatar. The user’s own digital identity and virtual presence is an important personal element between Metaverse spaces. The avatar will become the new social media profile picture and user’s would want to maintain it between different Metaverse platforms which is a challenge without open interoperability. Decentralized identity systems powered by blockchain have the potential to maintain the user’s Digital Human identity including the virtual presence avatar across Metaverse spaces. NFT might be used for linking the actual avatar asset and for the transaction of virtual goods and assets. The Digital Human doesn’t have to stop there and can be even more useful by leveraging heterogeneous data sources and providing unified real-time insights. We are watching this space closely and are working to solve some of the challenges that are arising, including the ethical and privacy aspects.
Figure 2: AltspaceVR and Bitmoji avatars of the author side-by-side showing the issue of different visual representation
5. Total Experiences (TX)
In 2021, we wrote about the potential of Multiexperience (MX) solutions also, for accessibility and Spatial Computing. Total Experiences go beyond MX and further include the customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and user experience (UX). TX enables outstanding shared experiences combining all of those in a homogenous, frictionless experience from A to Z. This requires a strong, unified user experience approach with user-centered design thinking, plus great technology support like cloud backends to fuel dynamic frontends with the data they need for the custom experience. Market researchers ran a survey and found that the top two reasons from business leaders for starting digital initiatives are : enhancing the customer experiences and increasing productivity for employees. With TX, businesses can achieve a holistic user experience approach both for customers and employees and this is right down our alley of expertise as well.
Figure 3: Photo of children building a conical tower. Every building block needs to be placed well to have a successful outcome, just like TX.
6. Democratization of AI
The trend with low and no-code development is continuing, even in the AI space where 2021 brought us further democratization of AI and investments into citizen data science where domain experts without prior Machine Learning or Deep Learning knowledge can create sophisticated, custom AI models easily. Also, designers and developers are benefiting from the immense progress with neural network and large transformer models used for Generative AI. Even experienced programmers are profiting by getting AI-assisted co-development into their hands with tools like GitHub Copilot which is very impressive as can be seen in the demo video below.
The trend is only going to continue with the rising adoption of AI in almost every digital transformation aspect of all industries. A recent survey among IT organizations saw an increase of AI adoption rising to 56% in 2021 from 50% in 2020. This is going to grow further but trained and skilled resources are the bottleneck, therefore the democratization of AI will be key to fulfill the demand and we are excited to be enablers of this for our clients.
7. Edge AI and IoT
Edge AI and IoT are maturing further and are key pieces for the growth of industry 4.0, not just in manufacturing. The data needs to be processed fast and smaller IoT devices become more and more capable of executing AI workloads directly on-site with Intelligent Edge deployments for shorter latency. This is particularly the case with computer vision models requiring large and fast data streams like images or videos. These AI models are trained in the cloud, then deployed to an edge device and executed. The best of both worlds is used with this approach where the scalability and computing power of the cloud is leveraged during training and the short latency of the edge deployment provide large benefits for real-time model inference.
Figure 4: Global IIoT market growth according to our own market research data analysis
8. Generative AI
A category of AI models is called generative AI models, which basically learn from training data to generate similar, but brand-new original assets. Impressive examples are human-like-text, poems, images, music, graphical art and more. The most impressive outcomes are enabled by so called transformer models with billions of parameters which can only be handled in the cloud, for example Microsoft’s Turing or GPT-3 (which is also the basis for GitHub Copilot). With such great innovations comes unethical things too, like Deep Fake videos or malicious voice synthesis which further emphasize the point that we need Digital Ethics and Responsible AI frameworks to limit the ability of bad actors. It’s not just doom and gloom with AI video synthesis and tools exist to generate custom talking head videos only from plain text as input, similar to what can be seen in the video below.
Generative AI will also play an important role in the Metaverse where large catalogs of assets are needed. Thanks to 3D AI models, these assets could potentially be synthesized from text input, imager or refined based on rough 3D scans from user’s mobile phones. It doesn’t stop there and market researchers are also seeing potential for industries like manufacturing, healthcare, life sciences, automotive, material science, entertainment, media, aerospace, defense and energy.
9. Homomorphic Encryption
Cyberattacks are increasing, even for AI security in the cloud and on the edge and it is important that companies start to apply Zero Trust models and become more proactive for cybersecurity threats. As a result of increased cybercriminal activity, data theft and general data privacy considerations data privacy regulations are also increasing. GDPR for example has strong regulations when it comes to data privacy and data processing. Data processing is being outsourced more and more which comes with strict regulations when client data is being handed over to a third party data processor. The best option would be to use encrypted data so that external processors don’t know the content, but of course, that counteracts the purpose of the processing. Homomorphic Encryption is a solution to that problem as it can perform computations and analytics directly on the encrypted data without having to decrypt it first. This enables third parties to work with encrypted data while having no knowledge about the data or the results. With the growing demand of data processing and strong privacy laws, the need is there and analysts believe future SaaS offerings will leverage Homomorphic Encryption as a core technology. This is also not just a futuristic vision but has already been implemented today, for example, by leveraging the Microsoft Azure SEAL open source library that enables certain arithmetic computation directly on encrypted data.
Figure 5: Encrypted text. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
10. Quantum Machine Learning
We have been covering Quantum Computing for quite some time now but we are just at the beginning with tremendous breakthroughs predicted for the coming years on both the software side and the hardware side, with new Quantum computer expected to have 433 Qubits by the end of 2022 and breaking the 1000 barrier with 1121 qubits in 2023. Analysts are also seeing that use cases are getting real already and the progress is just going to increase exponentially in the coming years, continuing the activity and investments in quantum computing that are sky-rocketing since 2015. In 2022, we are going to expand our Quantum footprint (more to come) and we will also continue the Quantum knowledge sharing with QuBites, our video podcast series where expert guests are interviewed to make the topic approachable for everyone. Season 3 had a partial focus on Quantum Security since in the next 5 to 30 years experts expect we will see Q-Day happen, the day when Quantum Computers are powerful enough to make today’s encryption algorithms obsolete (the basis of our security and privacy). The time is now for business leaders to prepare their (security) infrastructure for that with resilient Zero Trust models and crypto agility.
Currently we are publishing QuBites season 4 where we talk with a few experts in Quantum Machine Learning (QML), a rather new and promising discipline that is showing quite some benefits already, even with the Quantum hardware infancy today it can already outpace classical Machine Learning. In the below episode for example, I talked with Johannes about QML for image classification and the surprisingly good results that he got with a hybrid model approach. All QuBites episodes from season 1, 2, 3 and 4 can be watched here.
We believe 2022 will be another good year for digital transformation based on our industry knowledge and analyst’s market research. We will see lots of new emerging technology trends become mature and new ones on the rise. Regardless of what technology, all of these will have an impact on everyone and transform how we live in this modern hybrid work environment. We cannot wait to hear about what you have in mind and the goals you want to achieve to drive the future of your business! If you are interested to hear more, please reach out to marketing@valorem.com to schedule dedicated time with our industry experts
