Accenture’s annual Technology report finds all five major trends in 2018 being data centric

3 min read

Every year Accenture releases their annual forecast of the technology trends unfolding in the next three years. This year their Accenture Technology Vision 2018 highlights five emerging trends shaping the way technology is increasing businesses’ impact across society. The report covers people on all rungs of the corporate ladder, from strategy to operations, moving closer to the center of people’s lives.

Accenture’s Technology Vision comprises a three-year set of technology trends.

Accenture Evolution Chart

Here are the 5 major trends identified in the 2018 report.

Trend #1 CITIZEN AI: Raising AI to benefit business and society

As artificial intelligence grows in its capabilities, businesses must move to “raise” their AIs to act as responsible, productive members of society. For businesses, this means deploying AI is no longer just about training it to perform a given task. It’s about “raising” it to act as a responsible representative of the business, and a contributing member of society.

Per a survey conducted by Accenture, “72 percent of executives report that their organizations seek to gain customer trust and confidence by being transparent in their AI-based decisions and actions. This will be a crucial step in the integration of AI into society. We call it Citizen AI.”

Trend #2 EXTENDED REALITY: The End of Distance

Extended Reality XR refers to the spectrum of experiences that blurs the line between the real world and the simulated world. The technology immerses the user through visual, audio, and potentially olfactory and haptic cues. The two major types of XR are virtual reality and augmented reality.

The report ascertains that Virtual and augmented reality technologies are removing the distance to people, information, and experiences, transforming the ways people live and work. Per their Survey, “27 percent of executives state it is very important for their organizations to be a pioneer in XR solutions.”

Trend #3 DATA VERACITY: The Importance of Trust

By transforming themselves to run on data, businesses have created a new kind of vulnerability: inaccurate, manipulated, and biased data that leads to corrupted business insights with a major impact on society. Businesses can address this new vulnerability by building confidence in three key data-focused tenets:

Provenance, or verifying the history of data from its origin throughout its life cycle
Context, or considering the circumstances around its use
Integrity, or securing and maintaining data.

Strong cybersecurity and data science capabilities are prerequisites for building a strong data intelligence practice to ensure data veracity.

Trend #4 FRICTIONLESS BUSINESS: Built to partner at scale

Businesses depend on technology-based partnerships for growth, but their own legacy systems aren’t designed to support partnerships at scale. To fully become the connected Intelligent Enterprise, companies must first re-architect themselves.

Organizations must actively reshape their business from top to bottom to meet the challenges of creating and managing relationships at scale. They must adopt microservices architectures, and use blockchain and smart contracts to build a strong foundation for technology-based partnerships. Accenture Survey shows that “ 60% of executives report that blockchain and smart contracts will be critical to their organizations over the next three years.”

Trend #5 INTERNET OF THINKING: Creating Intelligent Distributed Systems

Businesses are making big bets on intelligent environments via robotics, AI and immersive experiences. But to bring these intelligent environments to life, they must extend their infrastructures into the dynamic, real-world environments.

For this, companies must extend compute beyond the cloud, toward the edge of networks. They must explore custom hardware solutions and hardware accelerators that let systems reduce latency and compute limitations. Cloud processing remains appealing for high-value learning, predictions, AI-model generation, and storage in situations that are not time critical. But for real-time action, processing must happen at the edge of networks, where the event is occurring.

Read the complete Accenture Technology Vision 2018 report to learn about the technology trends in detail along with the research methodology and the survey demographics.