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2. FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT
Turning out to be norm, this becomes one of the most anticipated read of the year – the trend report!
For some, it can be more like reading your horoscope even if you don’t believe in one, at the end of the year and imagining how the next year would be for you – but
with technology or industrial trends, the case is slightly different. While some of the trends can be perceived as overwhelming (giving you that ‘is it even possible’ streak
of thought), it would still be critical to pay attention to them and other emerging ones as they have all the potential to impact your business in the coming year.
And then, nobody could undermine the immense importance of preparedness till date – always better than taking that blind poker shot after all.

3. Chatbots or incorporation of digital assistants in some or the other form is seeing a rapid
adoption across businesses lately. And it is no more a hype as organisations have already passed
the stage of ‘Do I get it because everyone is also getting it?’ and realised its impact in their
functioning.
With major strides being taken in the realm of natural language processing, sentiment analysis,
the road seems brightly lit and free of any breakers. Even financial institutions, which have long
been termed as the high-risk industries owing to the stringent and high-security needs, are
adopting AI-enabled chatbots to manage a majority of their customer transactions, thus, limiting
the number of queries being routed to the human or live chat agents.
CHATBOTS – BECOMING BETTER
THAN EVER
As per a global survey, 65% professionals say they will use chatbots to
deliver customer support and technical documentation content to
those who need it, by 2019. 1
TREND #1

4. Customer services industry, especially, are in for a major over-haul as this trend picks up more
speed. That being said, one thing which is making it a successful trend is the thought that it is not
a human-replacement but a powerful assistant, helping the human to perform even better.
Empathy and instinctive-thoughts still are the biggest arsenal which humans possess and that’s
why, even for training the bots with specialised content, immense human skill and patience would
be the keys.
40% of large businesses will implement intelligent assistants or
chatbots by 2019. 2

5. The era of collaboration has come of age and we will be witnessing the prime tipping point in
the coming year with more and more organisations experimenting with the cocktail of
platforms for getting a 360-degree view of the customer landscape.
We will be seeing the integration of platforms, such as intelligent CRM, BI tools, sales force
automation platform etc. changing the dynamics for sales. Similarly, integrating IoT in
manufacturing processes and giving it an intelligent twist can be another example. Such
platform coalitions will reach greater heights with the interoperation becoming more seamless
than ever. The result – an absolute growth catalyst for organisations world over.
The scope to engage with the current and potential customer has become as endless as an
abyss and with increasing comfort with digitization in all business functions, companies are
going to leave no stone unturned to explore what lies on the other end.
AUTOMATION – GETTING AN
INTELLIGENT FACELIFT
TREND #2
Hence, the scope for such intelligent automation getting a truckload of additional arsenal with
strategic platform alliances taking a concrete shape, is what will be a major trend in the
coming year. In a nutshell, we’ll soon be stepping into a new era of redefined innovation
altogether.

6. With unprecedented developments in the artificial intelligence space, not just machines are
becoming smarter but even humans are crossing new bounds in all other domains. In 2019, we
should get ready to witness AI becoming an overriding force to ‘automation’.
If we see closely, AI has already penetrated quite much in-depth into our lives. From cameras to
smartphones to refrigerators, to even CRMs or automated sales funnels or more recent example
being the self-driving cars - we can see products with inbuilt AI sensors. Real-time intelligence is
now even prompting you what you may be interested in watching over Netflix next once your
sitcom gets over – and the list is endless.
AI AUGMENTATION TO SET RECORDS
By 2022, 40% of all new application development will involve AI co-
developers. 3
TREND #3

7. AI is all set to disrupt the analytics, autonomous vehicles or other application development
space in a major way. Immense amount of personalisation, precise profile mapping, accurate
trend analysis and future prediction, more than ever exact results from unalterably large and
unstructured database – all these are going to become the new normal in the business
landscape, going by the current trajectory of development and deployment.
In sales domain, C-suite expects their AI adoption to grow by 155% by
2020. 4

8. Catering to the changing business needs, connected cloud will be another trend expected to see
augmented adoption in the coming year.
With quite a lot of exploration of both the public and private end of cloud services, the hybrid or
connected cloud is all set to rehash the dynamics for businesses – combining the good and best
of both the worlds while sieving the complex intricacies of each.
With cloud storage and anytime-anywhere accessibility becoming common commodities for
businesses, these advanced-level developments will act as the differentiator benchmarks for cloud
service providers. And even for businesses, the right leverage of cloud platform will be a critical
element for enhancing their competitive score.
CONNECTED CLOUD TO SHOWCASE
TREMENDOUS AGILITY
Cloud platform services are seeing a steady growth rate of 20% this year. 5
TREND #4

9. Going by these predictions which are all signalling in the direction of immense growth, be it
IaaS market reaching $72.4 bn worldwide or SaaS market growing at 20% by 2020 or even
PaaS going to grow 56% in 2019 – the domain is all set for kicking-in a revolution. 6
The concept of multi-cloud is also expected to pick up pace in 2019 which means whether the
action would be happening on public, private or hybrid cloud – end users will always have a
seamless and integrated interface for their workload without ever facing a boundary glitch.
Global cloud services market is expected to reach $555 bn by 2020. 7

10. Finding the next new customer is the biggest ask which runs common across businesses of all
shapes and sizes. And with technology expanding the horizon for the same with discoveries in
the whitespace exploration space, intelligent database has majorly revamped the business
models.
Even 2018 saw big strides being covered in the realm of intelligent database with newer, faster
and more accurate methods coming up for reducing the noise and giving more precise and
high-scoring database. With subsequent development in the tech-integration space, 2019 will
see machine learning giving the rocket fuel to the course and thus, revolutionising the whole
process of intelligent automated web scraping and its cleansing. As it is, the ML market is
expected to grow to $8.81bn by 2022 – one can estimate the impact of the trend already. 8
INTELLIGENT DB AND MACHINE
LEARNING – A COCKTAIL OF
DISRUPTION
As per a research, 60% of organizations are at varying stages of
machine learning adoption, with nearly half (45%) saying the
technology has led to more extensive data analysis & insights. 8
TREND #5

11. With such power-packed integration and amalgamated intelligence, time taken to acquire the
‘next new customer’ will be majorly lessened by using extraction business rules and seamless
database management. We can expect intelligent bots to cull out contactable database with
multiple validations and checkpoints – a win-win for any business.
With bots such as contact finder bot – deciphering the contactability, email finder bot – to
complete the DB with correct addresses or other specialised ones which can be employed to
map out the verticals and sub-verticals to an organisation based on the names and locations
etc., database management will become increasingly accurate and apt.
As per a survey, 61% of organizations most frequently picked machine
learning / artificial intelligence as their company’s most significant data
initiative for next year. 8

12. Even the ones who never paid heed to a scientific methodology of planning, those businesses
are also turning into data-driven enterprises now – leave alone the rest who had long realised
the criticality of apt analytics application on the data.
With analytics becoming a core part of every business strategy lately, 2019 will not be any
surprise year in this domain but will see further refinement and integration of this technology
into processes and practices.
ANALYTICS TO HIT THE
ACCELERATOR AS A MIGHTY
CLOSURE CATALYST
Revenues for big data and business analytics solutions are forecasted to
reach $260 bn in 2022. 9
TREND #6

13. The optimistic statistic itself indicates the trajectory that we are on and how things will shape up
in the coming year as well. With predictive and prescriptive analytics being further strengthened
by developmental strides in cognitive analytics, leveraging semantics, artificial intelligence, deep
learning and machine learning, we may witness some gigantic success milestones in the realm of
precise insight extraction from data.
We can expect domain and language agnostic analytics to pave the way for insights-as-a-service
model. End-to-end cloud analytics can also prepare for another breakthrough if the expansion of
input nodes for analytics engine is successfully established beyond five human senses.
2019 will also see a lot more emphasis on building visually appealing information centers (thus,
better narratives) in sales-tech platforms to enable better customer conversion.
By 2020, 50% of IT organizations will apply advanced analytics in
application development to improve application quality and speed of
delivery. 10

14. The technology has long passed the journey of being termed as ‘too much of a hype’ and
entered into the ‘it will change everything’ zone. The broad-spectrum journey saw the
adoption leaping up, however the pace has been gradual with it becoming a groundswell of
enterprise interest. After all, every new technology has its own lifecycle to cover before
becoming a non-negotiable.
Last two years have been quite successful for blockchain for becoming a normal
nomenclature across organisations. However, it is still yet to shed the extra layerings of being
seen as a marketing ploy and get into the avatar of a bona fide technology offering.
BLOCKCHAIN TO CARRY ON WITH
THE BOOM – BUT GRADUALLY
Blockchain to be a $3.1 trillion business by 2030. 11
TREND #7

15. With “platform-itization” of emerging technologies becoming another major trend, it will be
fair to be prepared for blockchain-as-a-service as well – but again, at a steady pace without
expecting 2019 to be a year of turned-around-tables.
Because of the promising nature of the uptake of this technology, we can expect a large
workforce of developers to continue working on realizing the true potential of blockchain, in
the coming year. It may still take 2-3 more years before we actually start to see the nascency
cocoon being dissolved as had been promised earlier but that won’t stop the wheel and the
progression which 2019 will be laced up with.
By 2019, 20% more enterprises outside traditional banking will adopt
blockchain in emerging markets. 11

16. The criticality of capturing even the last mile data input, that too with negligible tolerance for any
miss, is getting bigger and bigger for organisations across the globe. Everybody wants to know
everything because who knows which data can become a potential insight generator which can set
one apart from the rest.
Thus, 2019 is all set to see a major boom in the realm of speech and image recognition becoming
mainstay components of all reporting strategies. Digital transformation and AI proliferation will
leverage the progress made in speech recognition to improve the deployment of business tools by
replacing input mechanism through speech.
Speech to text progression is being practiced by many but is still lacking the expected adoption
pace owing to its lacking on the vernacular side (English speech conversion still being most
common). We can expect this to change in 2019 with multiple companies working in this direction
already.
SPEECH AND IMAGE RECOGNITION
TO MAKE SOLID IN-ROADS
TREND #8

17. Similarly, image recognition will also get augmented inclusion in the realm of advanced
analytics, for example – it will be extensively leveraged in the space of merchandising
analytics for compliance management, making the process more transparent and real-
time.
With the focus on analytics and market insights, speech to text/ image recognition
evolution will become the primary driver of relevant and exact data capture in the
coming year. The trend will certainly reduce the ongoing struggle between strategy
deployment, feedback capture and effective eventual implementation.
Global image recognition market is expected to reach $43.57 bn by
2022 and $77.69 bn by 2025 while speech and voice recognition
market is expected to reach $18.30 bn by 2023, at a CAGR of 19.8%
between 2017 and 2023. 13,14 & 15

18. It’s been sometime that we have been hearing the alphabet soup of these acronyms and have
been relating them majorly to the event side of businesses, however, lately the inclusion has
become much more intrinsic with these immersive technologies broadening their outreach to
mainstream processes as well.
The overall bucket being a splendid customer experience (and now even remote-employee
outreach from internal usage pov), these technologies are going to create a tremendous stir in
the coming year.
Virtual Reality (VR) is going to see an increase in its adoption in the realm of remote training of
employees and the same is expected with the levels of development/ research being done in
the space.
AR, VR, MR AND XR – POWERFUL
ACRONYMS STORMING THE RETAIL
WORLD
Worldwide revenues for augmented and virtual reality will reach $162
bn in 2020. 16
TREND #9

19. Mixed Reality (MR) will also take on the transformative role with both VR and AR stepping up
their game. After all, with other digital tech taking care of rest of the things like delivery or
payment, the in-store experience weaved with these technologies, is going to be the key selling
point for retailers.
Bridging the physical gap between people, information and experiences, the entire cluster of
extended models of all these technologies – coupled under one umbrella of Extended Reality
(XR) is what will be a major trend in 2019. With businesses realising the criticality of setting up
differentiators as fast as possible, the leverage of these technologies will see a boom a beyond
the expected real-estate domain.
Mixed reality global market size which was roughly $47 mn in 2017, is
expected to scale up to about $3.7 bn by 2025. 17

20. As unlikely as it may sound, GDPR has gradually risen above the tag of ‘impediment’ which it
was given initially when the mandatory compliance came into effect this mid-year. Its time to
emerge as an enabler for rewriting business success is here and 2019 will see major action in
this direction (or to say, realisation).
It is a human tendency to be more inclined towards a trustworthy source and with GDPR (while
still being a mandate only for few), businesses have the opportunity to leverage this
psychology for increasing their revenues. That’s precisely the reason that the companies who
don’t even come under the geographic purview of mandatory compliance of GDPR, are
increasingly seeing customer requests for GDPR compliance in relation to their data.
GDPR – BECOMING A BUSINESS
OPPORTUNITY
TREND #10

21. The cost of GDPR compliance is expected to increase the existing budget
for information security, CRM and customer experience (CX) in the next
three years. 18
Apart from accurate metrics, secure transactions, transparent communications and reduction in
false data provision (consumers’ own safeguard practice) the wholesome GDPR compliance
package promises better customer experience and in turn, increased rate of conversions.
The privacy safeguard, in the long and drudgery era of intrusive marketing testing the patience of
consumers, is like a fresh breeze and the companies who will leverage this opportunity disguised
as a mandate, will surely be the one who’d be taking the customers home.

22. While there are more technology trends which we can expect to disrupt the industry further in the coming year – such as advancements in 3D printing revamping
the manufacturing space with all the technology integration or increasing penetration of wearables giving healthcare industry a new perspective etc., important is
to keep the radar in place, always.
Let’s gear up for another year where technology integration and new research results may seem overwhelming at first but will soon take up the role of biggest
supporters and drivers for leading us into the future which we have always imagined.
TIME TO JET SET GO!

23. 1. https://medium.com/@scottabel/2018-chatbot-adoption-report-widespread-adoption-of-chatbots-to-deliver-product-information-aa506ce3825a
2. https://www.spiceworks.com/press/releases/spiceworks-study-reveals-40-percent-large-businesses-will-implement-intelligent-assistants-chatbots-2019/
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveandriole/2018/10/22/gartners-10-technology-trends-for-2019-the-good-the-obvious-and-the-missing/#158ffb2e5999
4. https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/reports/sales/state-of-sales-3rd-ed.pdf
5. https://go.forrester.com/blogs/forrester-forecasts-5-1-growth-in-global-tech-market-in-2018-and-4-7-in-2019/
6. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/07/05/four-trends-in-cloud-computing-cios-should-prepare-for-in-2019/#5d3eecbe4dc2
7. https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/press-release/global-cloud-services-market-is-expected-to-reach-555-billion-globally-by-2020.html
8. https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2018/02/18/roundup-of-machine-learning-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2018/#1bafb8d02225
9. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44215218
10. https://www.gartner.com/ngw/globalassets/en/information-technology/documents/insights/100-data-and-analytics-predictions.pdf
11. https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveandriole/2018/10/22/gartners-10-technology-trends-for-2019-the-good-the-obvious-and-the-missing/#158ffb2e5999
12. https://www.gartner.com/ngw/globalassets/en/information-technology/documents/insights/100-data-and-analytics-predictions.pdf
13. https://www.reuters.com/brandfeatures/venture-capital/article?id=5680
14. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-image-recognition-market
15. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/speech-voice-recognition.asp
16. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160815005308/en/Worldwide-Revenues-Augmented-Virtual-Reality-Forecast-Reach
17. https://www.statista.com/statistics/897595/world-mixed-reality-market-value/
18. https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3871105
SOURCES

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