Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 23 | Page 53

EXPERT SPEAK a true Blockchain implementation that is useful for users. some of the factors that this concept is fighting with. So, we will see it maturing into a new generation of VR, which is more standard across platforms and surely at a lower cost which could then change the future success of VR and AR. As and when it is integrated seamlessly with the user’s natural behavioural pattern, it will start to become invisible, and that is the tipping Chatbots and Virtual Assistants – good to great INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 23 am Data and insights have been at the core of any transformation. Data has always been a key to companies being able to make decisions about products, services, employees and strategies. The form of this data and the formats have changed over the last few years. Old ways of looking at data are not going to help us anymore. More and more of our Digital Transformation engagements with clients are starting with major data engineering exercises. It is about breaking the so-called Big Data into small but actionable insights. A lot of data in organisations isn’t structured appropriately for analysis. There is much to be done about promoting data to be built into meaningful business analytics and realising the full Data to analytics; Machine Learning to AI point for every technology towards success and growth. lives, we have become very comfortable with the idea of conversational interaction which is now moving to a variety of systems ranging from mobile devices to thermostats and automobiles. It’s supposed to be a very natural way to interact with systems, both with voice and chat. Today it is still a work in progress. The good news is that many developments are happening in this field - natural language processing, conversational UI and sentiment analytics. Empathy, human emotion and experience are still at the core of any service. So, although machines may be good at delivering on clear-cut requests, they still leave a lot to be desired when it comes to dealing with empathy and human emotion. This would be again one of the top trends for 2019. I am sure we all would have had extremely frustrating chatbot experiences. But all is not lost on this one. In our personal , C o-f ou nde r of RBBi potential of the data being collected. Using enhanced processing power to increase Machine Learning, digital leaders will invest more of their data with Machine Learning and AI. Investment into data, analytics, Machine Learning and AI could grow the amount of data being used effectively by three or four times VR/AR/MR – will try to get its act together Will VR stay on or will it stagnate? I’m starting to feel bad for Virtual Reality (VR) because it appears so ‘cool,’ but it just hasn’t been feasible beyond gaming and highly specialised applications in today’s marketplace. Most of the applications you see around for VR are forced rather than being natural and seamless. Even the demand is not growing at a pace it was supposed to. MR, or Mixed Reality, on the other hand, which combines AR and VR, continues to be the name of the game in 2019 Digital Transformation trends. It has found tons of use cases in enterprise workforce training, and it’s not just cool, it’s useful. And that’s what technology is supposed to do. There are even rumours that we will hear something about a new AR or Mixed Reality product and developer kit from Apple soon. Lack of compatibility, dependence on hardware, cost and customer apathy are Search – taking the pain from discovery Search is reaching a tipping point and becoming invisible to human behavioural patterns. From a small box in the corner of the web-page to visual and voice, search, and assistance search is going main-stream. Will we expect it to become a standard item in digital strategy. One study says, Visual and Voice search would amount to 50% of all the searches done by 2020. What does this mean for Digital Transformation that is B2C focused and the e-commerce industry? Making digital, human – a trend that is changing how we look at technology A transformation is becoming more about the experience; this one trend is making its way slowly but surely on the scene. With the overdose of data, technology, platforms and digital, what we have forgotten, was ‘the human.’ Last year saw many organisations taking a step towards being more human and, in 2019, more organisations will jump on this and you will see many service providers and agencies also doing the same. We have started to understand that technology and everything around it cannot be the differentiator, it is just a facilitator. Which technology or platform you choose is becoming less relevant but what you do with it, how you be relevant to your users, how do you keep the human element and experience in-tact and how do you enhance the experience; is becoming the leading metric. ˜ 53