Kofax Top Technology Trend Predictions for 2023
How often do the predictors get held to task when it comes to what they foretell? Whether that’s in the worlds of sport or finance – or industry analysts playing Nostradamus with projected growth rates – too often we write for clicks and then move on, never to be held accountable.
Today is a new day. This technologist will hold himself accountable for last year’s predictions and provide insight into what’s ahead for 2023. I had some hits, some misses, and well…I’ll let you decide on others.
Here are a few, but not all, of my predictions from last year:
Automation eliminates jobs? Hardly! If last year taught us anything, it’s that workers want purpose. It’s frustrating that it took a global pandemic for the world to focus on employee experience, but here we are. Humans + tech creates the best experience so that workers can focus on what matters most to them and their customers.
Organizations were expected to spend more than $2 billion on intelligent automation in 2022, even during an economic downturn, which history dictates is exactly what happens when there aren’t enough workers to fill the open seats.
Prediction: ACCURATE
We’ll see you at the mixed-reality water cooler. Okay, with the desire to be one of the cool kids, I got ahead of my skis on this one. It’s not that virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) haven’t technologically progressed in the past twelve months, but the Metaverse is hardly being perceived as the greatest thing since the IP address at the moment.
Much like it’s taken time for organizations to figure out how to apply AI technologies to real-world problems, so too will it take more time for the corporate world to blend with the virtual one, although this tech will continue to grow on the consumer side this year.
Prediction: SWING-AND-A-MISS
Blockchain will not just be for pixelated monkey art. Wow. I was both right and somewhat right on this one. I posited that the NFT market would subside last year, and true to form with any new tech fad, average prices fell by a whopping 92% since may 2022.
At the same time, as global macroeconomic headwinds hit, the value of most cryptocurrencies plummeted. Enter the FTX scandal – which is still playing out as of this writing – combined with drying up start-up investments in general, and the adoption of blockchain outside of crypto has slowed.
Prediction: SOMEWHAT RIGHT
AI will go mainstream for next-gen automation. You might say that this was an obvious one, but it’s also been on the “Top 10” list of every technology crystal ball holder for many years – and for many years they were wrong. But the combination of workers shortages, hybrid work, and the most rapid capability advancement in recent memory, made this a reality in 2022.
AI was one of the fastest-growing IT investment segments last year; IDC expected spending to reach $118 billion by the end of2022, and it will more than double that to surpass $300 million in 2026. Other tools like GPT-3, Deep Mind, and DALL-E – which many hadn’t even heard of at the end of 2021 – finally received the recognition that these digital helpers are here to stay.
Prediction: NAILED IT
