Over the course of the pandemic, the most important lesson for individuals and businesses alike has been that transformative change isn’t as difficult to implement as it seems. As the world continues to harness the newfound openness to flexibility, agility, and innovation, businesses are shifting their focus from merely attempting to survive to changing the world that thrives.
Technology has become the driver of change, filling all the areas of inefficiencies and creating opportunities where there were significant challenges. With the covid-19 pandemic still a part of our lives, 2022 will likely continue to see accelerated digitization and virtualization of business. However, this year will also accelerate the need for sustainability.
Moving into 2022, while the world is still riding this technological wave, the pandemic is pushing the boundaries, and changes are happening quickly. It is now paramount for businesses to remain ahead of the curve by embracing the biggest trends.
With many innovations and breakthroughs happening, 2022 will help in transforming business and society. The trends will act as force multipliers for digital business and innovation over the next few years. Here are the key tech trends that will shape the year 2022 and beyond.
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Artificial Intelligence-driven tech will be everywhere
AI capabilities are expanding with each innovation. From discovering ways to capture real human emotion to enhancing the experience of hybrid rooms in meetings, AI has enabled businesses to accomplish every task.
AI has imbibed the tools we use to perform everyday work. From the ubiquitous voice assistants to language translation, Ai tools can extract structured data from pictures, whiteboards, and hand-written notes. It is also powering the robotic process automation (RPA) that is enabling workloads to be lightened in multiple domains. Whether it's an industry or a job function, AI-powered solutions are making life easier.
Read more: Top Ethical Challenges in AI – The Price of Progress
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Tech to Drive Sustainable Solutions
With customers urging sustainable products and practices, businesses are seeing technology development in a new light. They are working towards providing a smarter way forward to build a better future.
Businesses are now diverting their attention toward recyclable materials like fibers and metals that can self-decompose like bioplastics. With more renewable sources like bamboo becoming readily available for product development, businesses are moving closer to the loop on the product lifecycle.
Recycling and supply chain optimization is becoming more commonplace. This rise in sustainable materials is also helping in minimizing the requirement for chemicals in the manufacturing process, thus bringing manufacturers closer to carbon neutrality. With the new tech trends, the role of IT providers will continue to transform and build solutions that help customers neutralize the environmental impact. These innovative changes are enabling enterprises to reach their own sustainability goals.
New technologies, like AR/VR glasses, are helping to reduce carbon footprints. These new capabilities are allowing remote workers to be engaged with another location, thus reducing travel and leading to carbon savings.
Read more: Bias in Artificial Intelligence: Is Diversity the Key to the Future Of AI?
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Digitization, datafication, and virtualization
In 2020 and 2021, users experienced the virtualization of their workplaces, and remote working arrangements took the main stage. This crisis-driven surge in 2022 led to the world becoming increasingly familiar with the concept of a metaverse. Metaverse creates persistent digital worlds that exist in parallel with the physical world we live in.
With the increase in digitization, metaverse offers a model that simulates the real world with growing accuracy and allows them to have more immersive and valuable experiences within the digital realm. From working to playing and socializing, 2022 is predicted to create immersive virtual experiences that will be indistinguishable from reality.
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Virtual Space-borne Companies will take center stage
More venture businesses are being born virtually. Companies are now pursuing virtual data rooms and virtual events as the future. These companies are assisting businesses across the globe to conduct operations without requiring a physical presence. Other enterprises are booming by offering products that assist new companies with task and project management in virtual space.
Companies will be seizing these opportunities to enhance their space of virtualized productivity by implementing fit-to-purpose tools. AI-targeted productivity tools will emerge with all the requisite learning mechanisms.
In 2022, the boundaries of our world will be much less pronounced. With the world getting closer, the majority of tech companies are spreading with their staff working from far-off places all around the world. Companies will think beyond borders and working from anywhere and everywhere will be at their core.
Read more: ESG & Sustainability: Shaping the Future of Digitized Procurement Value Chain
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ESG: Data to become critical to model scenarios and tracking progress
Businesses are now making efforts around ESG that aren’t purely regulatory-driven. Customers are now demanding more ESG-driven insights into organizations’ products and services. Meeting these expectations will enable businesses to tap into new markets and avoid eroding their existing market. This is compelling organizations to evaluate and assess their supply chain.
Identifying ESG-relevant data helps businesses to bring structures to their collection and curate critical status quo to model future scenarios and track progress against their ESG strategy. Enterprises are resource planning vendors to update their offerings to address their ESG requirements and add ESG-related capabilities to their existing software.
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Low-code/no-code: Cultural changes will follow technological advancements
Low-code/no-code platforms have become well established over the course of the pandemic. It allows users to easily prototype, iterate, and customize applications, making software development faster. It also serves as an accelerator for large-scale digital transformation. Technology will widely enable businesses and benefit them to make the necessary cultural shift. Established hierarchies will be altered as the balance shifts toward greater agility and cross-functional collaboration. Businesses are translating demands into digital requirements to demonstrate their agenda and deliver tangible outcomes.
Read more: Social Media Trends to Watch Out For in 2022
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Permanent Adjustments to Transform Hybrid Workspaces
Employee expectations are changing as they have realized the power of hybrid workspaces. While before the pandemic, people followed technology, today technology follows people - from where and when to want to work. The rise in a digital workplace is driving productivity and well-being.
One of the biggest lessons out of the Covid-19 pandemic was that - businesses need not be confined to a physical location. Hybrid working offers more flexibility and helps balance employees. It promotes more productivity and allows the organizations to explore a more diverse pool of candidates.
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Telehealth to Gain the Spotlight
2022 is predicted to accelerate the use of telehealth. Implementation of telehealth options moved forward at warp speed due to the onset of the pandemic. Consumers and healthcare professionals are embracing these options. With the healthcare landscape continuing to move toward a digital model, health care and insurance are likely to become more affordable and accessible.
As patients adopt these technologies, health care professionals will be able to provide personalized, virtual assistance and provide more accurate care that provides better outcomes. In 2022, virtual care will help enhance patient access to healthcare and make it easier for professionals to monitor their vitals and improve their compliance.
Hybrid workspaces will make workflows across different time zones and locations more frictionless. With the hybrid working standard evolving, organizations will explore more avenues to deliver on employee expectations around connectivity, talent mobility, and well-being. Organizations will prioritize mobility to find a diverse and previously untapped talent pool.
In Conclusion
Today, tech is evolving at a faster pace, enabling faster innovations and progress, thus leading to an accelerated rate of change. However, it is not just the technology trend that is evolving; a lot more has changed this year due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
2021 has constantly been a phase of learning, unlearning, and relearning. 2022 will be the year businesses will work towards reevaluating their internal goals and aligning them with the right progressive tech solutions. Moving forward, while 2022 looks exactly the same, the year is slowly gravitating towards enhanced technology. These innovations hold higher-than-ever importance in our wellness in this new paradigm.
The year 2022 looks optimistic as we reflect on the last year of the pandemic. The popular trends in 2022 will likely focus on the convergence of technology trends as tools that will enable us to combine them in new and unique ways. These are only a few trends that will define 2022 as we move ahead on the path of technological advancements. Spurred by the pandemic, a lot of the upcoming trends will bring back businesses into the acceleration of the digital transformation.
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