How Tech Trends Might Affect Your Business

In the age of a technology factor in business, it’s impossible for business owners to distant themselves from trends and advancements. From banking to parking, technological advancements disrupt the way companies plan their workflows and development strategies. While innovations are normally a reinforcement to any enterprise, if you stay behind and fail to catch up, sale rates will be at risk of crumbling.

In order to ensure technological advancements bring sheer value to a business, it’s important to track down special info on emerging trends and be aware of their potential impact.

Here’s the list of tech trends that will be the most impactful in the business environment over the course of the next 5-10 years.

1. 5G Networks

While we are not there yet, both telecommunication providers and device manufacturers are paving the way for 5G networks. The improved connection will increase the bandwidth and as well as the range of the Internet.

Speed is not all there’s to 5G. One of its most treasured qualities is reduced latency – a timeframe needed to transfer a data packet from one point to another. With such, 5G clears a way for AR and VR-powered tools, improves the efficiency of IoT devices, speeds up workflows and business communications.

Without a doubt, 5G as a technological factor affecting business is different depending on the industry. Here are those for which the innovation will be the most groundbreaking:

Artificial intelligence and automation;
Medicine;
Banking;
Information Technologies.

According to Qualcomm, 5G will generate up to $3.5 trillion in revenue up to 2035. It’ll allow business owners to support up to 22 million jobs. It will enable new products and provide companies with better insights on customer behavior. Thanks to 5G, advertising campaigns will be even more precise and efficient – marketing managers will be able to target the customer from the first try.

2. Augmented analytics

Business intelligence and analytics are one of the tech trends in business in 2020 as it has been rapidly developing lately. The impact of business intelligence tools for SMEs and big corporations is enormous. Apart from being able to analyze and influence buying decisions in meaningful ways, companies will be able to optimize inner workflows.

Here are some applications BI and advanced analytical tools have in stock for businesses:

Assisting employees with no data expertise. Thanks to intelligent analytical tools, teams will be able to spot trends as well as find solutions to problems they never managed to state. Such a tool, for instance, will be capable of gathering data on how to change manage customers list in Magentoin a matter of seconds.
Improve the speed of providing data. With advanced tools, insights and analytics can be updated in real time. Unlike reports created by data scientists, that have a high risk of being outdated, those generated automatically will always be up-to-date.
Visualize large amounts of datain a concise, aesthetically pleasing way. A business owner will be able to display customers’ preferences and journey in the form of graphs, diagrams, and tables.
See the cause-effect relationship between data. While most businesses don’t lack statistics, the absence of knowledge regarding what to do with the information gained doesn’t allow companies to harness its full power. With augmented analytics, dedicated tools will be the ones to connect the dots between all the collected data.

3. Blockchain

The blockchain is an innovation capable of revolutionizing all major industries, with businesses all over the world under its impact. The technology started off as a fuel for cryptocurrency – it’s has become apparent later that there’s much more to the blockchain. Industries like banking, healthcare, and others, all turned to blockchain adoption in order to improve security and improve their workflows by cutting middlemen.

Here are the most common implementations of blockchain that will be the most impactful in 2020:

Smart contracts– businesses can activate actions automatically as soon as all the conditions of a ‘smart contract’ are met. This application of blockchain will secure transactions and improve their efficiency.
Securing digital assets. That’s a go-to blockchain application in industries like banking or healthcare. Being able to protect sensitive data (medical records or financial statements, for instance) will allow a business owner to share confidential information with no one but a trusted circle while simultaneously increasing the speed of processing claims.
Empowering low-cost microtransaction– such an application has been widely used by content creators and entertainment platforms. With blockchain, a publisher will be able to charge a customer for every article read, not a monthly subscription. In the long run, microtransaction will drastically reduce transaction costs.
Securing intellectual property. Protecting shared work like films, music, or books has become a pressing issue with the spread of the Internet connection. Looks like Blockchain legders can finally offer a solution to this problem by mitigating digital privacy and enforcing usage rights.

4. Digital ethics and privacy regulations

The number of solutions designed to collect and process user data is growing on a daily basis. However, as with great power comes great responsibility, governments couldn’t ignore the issue of privacy and cybersecurity anymore. According to Business Insider, data breaches have compromised the personal information of over 500 million users.

When it comes to data breaches in 2018, the spotlight was shared by global corporations – Google, Facebook, T-Mobile, Orbitz, and Quora. At this rate, one can only imagine how many incidents targeted SMEs but left unreported to the public eye.

As for now, there are several directions businesses have to work towards:

Consumer trust. An SME owner has to make sure his client understand the purpose of all the technology used as a part of the workflow and are aware of its harmlessness.
Employee ethics. Employee protests at Google have proven that companies tend to overstep their boundaries and use invasive technology in order to control employee’s efficiency. In case a business owner wants to steer clear from negative publicity and governmental fines, he has to make sure an employee has consented to the use of tracking technology, that these means aren’t misused or conflicting with an employee’s principles.
Data protection. Governments all over the world have started paying attention to ways companies collect, process, and store data. This includes verifying encryption algorithms, running external audits, and having a team of data scientists to oversee possible bottlenecks.

5. Immersive experiences

Augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) has been revealing a ton of unexplored potential in terms of attracting new customers and improving brand awareness as well as optimizing the workflow within the company and enhancing a team’s business efficiency. The use of holographic imagery has tremendous implications for remote work – it’ll increase the immersion during the meeting, make remote pitching and data visualization times more efficient.

Immersive experiences offer use cases when it comes to product design as well. For instance, AR and VR can be used to create realistic prototypes and examine them from different angles without having to use materials for production and engage the additional workforce.

Finally, AR can enhance customer experiences – improve navigation inside the store, offer risk-free product testing in a client’s native environment, and provide a sense of ownership of the product without even seeing it at a physical store.

Conclusion

Modern businesses are forced to adapt to innovations and changes in technology in order to keep up with the competition and not risk irrelevance. Technology trends like the introduction of 5G connection, the development of blockchain and augmented analytics and immersive experiences are disrupting companies of all sizes across various industries.

Online businesses are no longer as immune from legal responsibility as they once used to be. Both for SMEs and big corporations, it’s crucial to adhere to data protection and cybersecurity regulations in order to avoid charges and penalties.

Regardless of possible risks and the increase in the competition provided by the development of IT trends, they can enhance a business tremendously. Adopting innovations step-by-step and keeping an eye on emerging trends is all it takes to be the niche frontrunner in digital transformation.