As time moves forward, businesses find prospective niches and new technologies. Building with the tools that innovation gives us is important to provide the best customer experience. Businesses that fail to adjust to trends lose relevance and may fall behind the competition. They have fewer opportunities to grow, which limits their potential.
Each year, the biggest consulting firms and tech giants research the market ecosystem to make sure they don't miss the opportunities that trends may bring. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the trends that are going to shape our tomorrow during 2022.
Artificial intelligence
Prospective industries: automotive, healthcare.
The AI trend is here to stay. In addition to the advances of AI across healthcare (Novartis’s development of an AI-powered central command center for global clinical trials), there are vast opportunities that AI opens in almost every niche and industry. Nevertheless, in 2022 we should look closer at decision intelligence, AI engineering, and generative AI.
Automated decision-making is becoming possible due to the integration of data, analytics, and AI. The insights generated this way may augment and sharpen the decisions companies make along the way.
AI engineering is going to deliver consistent business value from AI by integrating data and model and development pipelines. The value of such an approach is expected to surpass regular AI practices at least three times.
Imagine a form of AI that can innovate by itself - that’s generative AI. It will learn from sample data and generate original artifacts that don't repeat, but are realistic and new. By 2025, generative AI is expected to account for 10% of all data produced.
Techstack case
Techstack applies AI in many products in the manufacturing, sales enablement, and entertainment industries. One of these included a face- and image-matching service for quick access to photos taken at mass events. We built a proof-of-concept to verify whether matching faces in selfies was feasible. The algorithm we built used AI and deep neural networks. We also worked on an ML-based flaw detection system for manufacturing lines.
AR/VR and Metaverse
Prospective industries: entertainment, healthcare.
The augmented and virtual reality relevance make a great come-back in 2022, thanks to the buzz around the metaverse. AR/VR had seemed to drop out of the competition to be the hottest trend all on its own. This is far from true. Hospitals and clinics are developing a wide range of uses for augmented reality and virtual reality, in areas as diverse as telemedicine, in-patient care, and hospital operations. As part of the extended reality (XR) industry, AR/VR niches don't show any signs of a possible decline in growth in the years to come. The unique combination of realistic graphics, sounds, haptic feedback, or even smell it brings to the table makes the area a perfect soil for many projects in the entertainment industry.
The metaverse is expected to become the new standard for digital presence by many global companies in the world and the next level of social technologies. It's no wonder it will heavily rely upon new technologies and AR/VR. As a replacement for social life and engagement available from anywhere in the world, the metaverse may provide us with new work, sports events, concerts, shopping and engagement experiences. And there are no limits to what we can anticipate in the future.
Big Data
Prospective industries: energy, automotive, financial services, manufacturing.
Big Data was never an underestimated trend. Still, this year we are going to focus on data fabrics and sharing data between companies within one ecosystem or supply chain as two especially promising areas.
Another aspect that can significantly increase data usage efficiency is data sharing across the platforms that are involved in one ecosystem. The insights shared across platforms made it possible for researchers to develop vaccines or medicines faster when the COVID-19 pandemic had just started.
Techstack case
Techstack built a Big Data solution for a manufacturing company. What we delivered was an API for third-party data aggregation with complex data flows and logic. We also set up and configured manufacturing point servers and aggregated servers for historical data storage.
Blockchain and NFT
Prospective industries: energy, financial services, media, retail/CPG, telecommunications.
Blockchain has proven to be an efficient platform for driving fundamental changes in businesses and not just hype. This is the reason why its popularity will rise steadily during the next few years. The areas it promises to reinvent include copyright law, identity protection, data, and digital assets management, brand building, and more. The shift it brings to the world makes the idea of the metaverse even more real: citing an internal post to employees from Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer (according to the New York Times report), Meta is aiming for “deep compatibility” with blockchain technology.
Based on the research of the Blockchain and DLT growth statistics and the wide range of capabilities it provides, it's going to form a completely new and huge market. Promising startups using Blockchain or NFT as the basis of their businesses grab multimillion initial offerings (ICO) and will grow into game-changing companies as the market evolves.
Internet of Things
Prospective industries: agriculture, manufacturing.
Edge computing and IoT are also less likely to drop out of the list of the biggest software trends to date. According to BMC, companies can expect edge computing to improve predictive maintenance, fleet and product management, and voice assistance. The number of devices that penetrate our everyday routines grows; now we can see the increased adoption of IoT beyond personal usage - in the agricultural sector.
The global smart agriculture market is expected to reach $15.3 billion by 2025. Smart farming solutions will be able to reduce the waste of resources such as water and electricity as well as monitor crops from everywhere in the world. Satellite surveillance over forest lands can reduce the devastating fires that harm the ecology of the planet. Moreover, IoT solutions may utilize sensors to grab and analyze the current state of crops, as well as collect data for predictive analytics.
Techstack case
Techstack builds IoT solutions for manufacturing companies. For example, last year we created an IoT hardware kit software for temperature standards monitoring that prevents critical states.
SaaS and Cloud computing
Prospective industries: agriculture.
Speed is the major survival factor for startups nowadays. That's why providers are more likely to shift to solutions assembly rather than building from scratch - composable applications.
The problem with migrating existing legacy workloads is their poor uncustomized design that usually can't be efficiently adapted for the cloud. The maintenance costs and migration challenges make cloud-native platforms more scalable.
Techstack case
Techstack has demonstrated experience in building cutting-edge SaaS products from the early development stages to steady growth and success.
E-mobility
Prospective industries: manufacturing.
Consumers' mobility preferences change over time, adding new modes of transportation. McKinsey’s Global Automotive & Mobility Consumer Survey shows their growing interest in traveling and innovations in autonomous driving, connectivity, electrification, and smart mobility.
Decarbonization solutions are also among the ambitions that could disrupt mobility soon. For instance, the EU has targeted a reduction in net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030. This goal may force governments to introduce stricter regulations on car usage and even more — the shift may require a holistic mobility shift from cars to other means of transport.
Cybersecurity
Prospective industries: automotive, financial services.
Fragmented security is more prone to breaches. To defend organization perimeters, cybersecurity mesh architecture integrates security tools to defend business assets distributed across cloud and data centers. Privacy-enhancing computation will soon enable safe data sharing across ecosystems.
When 5G Internet is live, devices connected to the network can make third-party attacks capable of ruining software systems. Cyber AI has prospects to help negate the attacks faster and take countermeasures beforehand, according to Deloitte.
Robotics / drones
Prospective industries: agriculture, automotive, healthcare.
Businesses strive to automate as many processes as possible, which often requires orchestrating tools and platforms. This trend is called hyperautomation and it drives the growth of robotics across various industry niches. By 2024, Gartner predicts that diffuse hyperautomation spending will drive up the total cost of ownership 40-fold, making adaptive governance a differentiating factor in corporate performance.
The manufacturing sector is changing rapidly, spurred on by technological progress, with companies ramping up their use of robots, chatbots, and drones to provide contactless care to clients. The impulse is so strong that it has impacted industries on a national level. For example, Japan is increasing its robot-related annual budget to $351 million. The European Union aims to invest $780 million in manufacturing-related digital innovation before 2027.
Recap
The nine global software trends described above will shape the technology landscape in the coming years. Businesses occupying niches within the trending industries that use the technologies we included on the list have the biggest growth potential and will make big leaps in innovation.
Let's talk in more detail about how to implement trending technology within your product! Contact our Development Consulting Team to learn the best practices of implementing technology that is aligned with world software trends, and ensure the steady growth of your product.
