To compete with other businesses, you need to keep up with the new technology. If you don’t keep up with the trends, other businesses will have a competitive advantage over you.
You need to know about new trends in cybersecurity, AI, clouds, and data analytics. The pandemic has accelerated many digital trends that were already progressing quickly before the pandemic. Remote work suddenly became common; this would have taken longer without the virus.
New technology such as 5G will become mainstream much faster due to remote work. Strong, fast, reliable connections are now more important to the economy than ever before.
1. Data Analytics
They say that data is the new oil – it is what today’s increasingly information-driven economy runs on. Companies make money by gathering and analyzing data better than their competitors do.
Digital Analytics is the process of turning raw data into useful information. A data analyst can turn a lot of data points about customers’ demographics and purchases into business strategies.
For example, they might find that people in a certain age range do not buy a product or service, not even if you advertise it to them. With new AI tools, you can extract better information than ever before. The economy already runs on data, and this will continue to become more true in the future.
2. Customer Data Platforms
Customer data is more important than ever before. Customer data includes a customer’s name, age, gender, location, and contact information. A company might also have access to information about a person’s hobbies, marital status, job, and income.
A customer data platform (CDP) is a way of putting this information together. If you have information from a few different sources and only look at one of them, you might not be able to learn enough about the customer to make a sale. You can do better if you use a tool like a CDP to organize the information.
3. Digital security
Both ways of hacking into systems and ways of protecting systems from hackers are becoming more advanced. Encryption that was strong enough ten years ago may not be good enough today because newer computers can break codes faster. Multi-factor authentication, on the other hand, improves security.
Remote work may increase hacking threats. If everyone is in the office, it is difficult for an outsider to hack into the system; this stops being true when people are working from miles away. A hacker might steal secret information from a company, or they might have a fake identity and scam the company out of money.
It is also easy to spy on people with new technology. A serious threat is automotive hacking – there may soon be cases of people being killed by hackers that take control of their vehicles.
There have already been cases of hackers taking control of vehicles in a dangerous way. A terrorist incident involving car hacking and causing many deaths sounds far-fetched, but it might already be possible to do – there are many hackable cars on the road today.
4. Connected clouds
Connected clouds are another way of organizing customer data to create a detailed view of the individual to tailor your sales strategy. You will see data from video, searches, mobile, and other sources of information in a single place.
The alternative to a connected cloud is a “stack,” where you look at a few sources of data separately. With a connected cloud, you will see a dashboard with as much information as possible.
With public clouds, you do not have to own the hardware yourself. Instead, you can use a service that provides computing resources to you.
You can use this hardware over the internet and not need to have the hardware in your offices. Not having to buy hardware is an advantage, but other companies can use the same hardware that your company uses. A cloud computing company will let more than one company use its hardware.
With a private cloud, only your company can use the hardware. You still do not have to own the hardware yourself – you can still use a third party’s hardware. However, the third party will not allow any other companies to use the hardware you use.
Sometimes, a company might prefer to have its own data center and not access a third party’s hardware over the internet. This is still considered a private cloud even if the company owns its own hardware.
A hybrid cloud is a mix of the two. You might both have your own hardware and use other hardware that a third party provides. You can share data and applications between the public and the private cloud.
5. Artificial intelligence
There are so many new and exciting things in AI that it is difficult to know where to start. Artificial Intelligence can write a story or write a song. It can help people design new products, and sort through data and come up with conclusions that a human would not have found.
Artificial Intelligence has made many formerly expensive services much cheaper. While there is still room for human transcribers, much of this work is done by AI. Transcription is becoming something done by software.
A company can use a service such as Audext to convert audio to text much more quickly and cheaply than a human transcriber could do it. Many other types of software besides audio-to-text software get noticeably better every year.
6. The Internet of things
Everything from fridges to scales connects to the internet these days. Lots of formerly dumb appliances are now smart. Televisions, radios, watches, cars, and security systems all connect to the internet today.
You can control many of your appliances from a distance with your smartphone. Smart microwaves watch your food to avoid cooking it, and people get in shape faster with fitness trackers.
These devices can sometimes communicate with each other. For example, your alarm clock might connect to your coffee maker.
This new technological phenomenon matters outside of people’s houses as well. It does not only involve consumer appliances. For example, a car company can learn more about what parts of their car wear out the fastest using sensors.
You can also lose money paying for human transcription if AI could do the job just as well with the audio you have. There are many services that AI is already replacing, and your business should not waste money on them.
