We attended the 2020 CogX conference virtually. Last year we were there in person, however this year we showed up only virtually. Bernard Marr is an influential writer on trends, we summarise what he talked about.
1. AI and Machine Learning
Now this technology is really used to engage customers and streamline processes. Can do a number of things such as make sense of the data. AI can help us analyse this data and bring conclusions, especially during Covid in the healthcare space. It can be used to predict R (covid transmission) rates for example. AI can even write the books that we read. AI vision can be used to look at the lungs of patients. Coming out of the pandemic companies that use AI will have better decision making.
Lidl has introduced Margot used to help customers select wine, something that has been a big seller during the lockdown. Domino’s pizza are now using machine vision to detect the quality of their pizza’s as they leave the ovens.
2. Robotics
Robot dog used in Singapore to patrol parks for social distancing, along with drones in China. Questions are around how to automate supply chains with autonomous ships and drivers. UPS have partnered with self driving start-up to explore autonomous delivery.
With Covid, more automation is getting into hospital to provide everything from reminders to surgical procedures.
Waymo are using self driving Taxi’s and Dubai has self flying helicopters. China even has a drone hotel.
3. Services and Cloud Revolution
Almost everything can be done as a service. We have seen this Zoom for example with their on demand services who can increase their capacity as nw users come online.
RPA (Robot Process Automation) will also have robots as a service for example – even robot pickers on a Pay as You go service. We expect more edge computing where computing is happening within devices such as phones and cameras.
4. 5G communications
The next evolution of mobile communications. More home-working and this trend will stick around with companies such as Twitter and FaceBook allowing staff to work from home indefinitely.
5. Augmented and Extended reality
AR (Augmented Reality) can enable engineers to better diagnose problems with machinery. The pandemic has forced us to embrace virtual tools such as video conferencing. Extended reality will stay after the covid crisis. AR can enable our phones for example to overlay digital objects onto the world around us. Imagine Pokemon Go, but instead of satnav screens – the windscreen would display necessary data.
Major trends around education employing AR. Burger kind has released an App to burn competitors adverts and burn them and earn a free Whopper burger.
Summary
Quantum Computing doesn’t appear here, but we thought you would enjoy to learn about these 5 topics. Bernard Marr has spoken about Quantum computing and he does mention QC in his 25 tech trends.