GP The Panel 1: 2019 Tech Trends

This first appeared in the Guernsey Press on 29th January 2019.

Q: What will be 2019’s big tech trends?

A: It’s common to think of technology trends as discrete items that develop independently of one another. In reality it’s simultaneous advances in many areas that collectively advance the state of the art.

In 2019, we won’t see the emergence of one attention-grabbing new technology as we did with e.g., blockchain bursting on to the scene in 2017/18; instead we’ll see continued development of existing technologies where the overarching theme will be concentrated on the connectedness of services and data and in the increasing capabilities of machines to use these to act more autonomously - or in one word - automation.

Automation currently exists in many guises. There is a lot of hype around the buzzword-rich tech du jour such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process automation.

If we look beyond the monikers and instead analyse what these technologies really enable - more efficient business processes and access to faster, more well-informed decision-making - these areas will see a lot of growth in 2019 as the barriers to use of these technologies will continue to drop.

Adoption of automation technologies will be enabled by the continued growth and increasing availability of seamlessly connected cloud services in conjunction with advances in edge computing (and to some extent IoT) and the rollout of 5G.

Healthy competition in these areas should see these services more affordable than ever.

As part and parcel of this, we can expect an increased emphasis on information security - from the privacy standpoint - as GDPR really starts to take hold and businesses are held fully accountable for the ways in which they process data - and from a cyber-security standpoint where the rate and scale of exploits shows no sign of abating.

Nevertheless, 2019 should be a pivotal year for businesses and consumers alike when it comes to the speed, ease and cost of a truly connected user experience.