TECH PREDICTION for 2021
It goes without saying that 2020 was the most disruptive year in the past decade or more. 2020 literally forced new migrations, not only for consumers but also for global businesses.

ONE OF THE BIGGEST is the MIGRATION of employees from their office cubical to their home desk.

Businesses had to quickly adapt and implement security and logistic measures, performance-tracking systems, new server infrastructures that allow employees to access internal data securely from outside the office, and more.

This may seem a simple process but depending on the size of the organization and the flexibility of their internal systems (digitalized/non-digitalized), many businesses simply couldn’t cope with this immediate need for change and had to close shop, leaving many employees without a job.

Some that were already fully digitalized, flourished, and announced work from home permanent post-COVID, for example, Twitter and Dropbox.

This movement paved the way to the SECOND MIGRATION. ENTREPRENEURSHIP.

While some people immediately began looking for companies that have a fully digitalized framework and job opportunities, others have seen this as an opportunity to launch their own business, a lot of them flocking towards eCommerce/eServices.

The common denominator in 2021 will be DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION.

Businesses will need to start or continue the process of being omnipresent online, both from an organizational standpoint and for their customers.

A successful digital transformation strategy must include:

Customer Experience, Data & Insights, Strategy & Leadership, Technology, Operations, Culture & People, Organization, Marketing, Cybersecurity, and Brand Management.

Transformation is different for every company and sadly, many digital transformations fail. For some businesses, the disruption may be so great that their long-term strategic vision will need to be overhauled. Any digital transformation roadmap that does not offer added value to the user will need to be reimagined.

With 2021 just around the corner, here are 5 topics in Tech & Digital Transformation that are worth keeping an eye out for.

AI Chatbots

If you’ve chatted with any retailer online in the past months, chances are, you’ve spoken to an AI-powered chatbot.

AI fed with data scraped from real conversations, combined with NLP gives a rather scary result, human-like conversations, that can be text-only and, even Voice enabled.

Some of the benefits Voice AI can bring to businesses are:

- Zero wait time, 24/7 instant availability

- enhanced customer insights

- better two-way interaction

- increased productivity

- fraud detection

- & more.

It is expected that more companies will want to automate customer experience processes with AI-powered chatbots rather than scripted chatbots.

Not only that, but we will see chatbots participating in the sales funnel, providing relevant, personalized recommendations.

My guess is if you’re looking to stay on top of the game in 2021, implementing AI-powered chatbots for your business is one crucial step for you to take.

2. Advanced Data Analytics -Data Quality Management to Become More Prominent

Following an unpredictable 2020 and global pandemic, using analytics in the wake of innovation and digital transformation globally is not just a recommendation but a must.

Managing data quality doesn’t just revolve around having high-quality data to stack and analyze. It implies cleaning and preparing data, distributing it across your organization (remote workers included), managing the data, and, ultimately, examining it with the inclusion of AI, RPA, and more and adopting relevant business decisions.

Data Analytics providers are already developing new infrastructures “DaaS” services to help businesses reconfigure their business processes, and what better way to do so than AI and Cloud Computing.

DaaS: Data as a Service will be more prevalent, as businesses will have more visibility into AI, and cloud systems will reconfigure their products and services to accommodate the ever-growing demand.

Want to learn more about how Data Analytics can help your business? Reach out and ask specific use cases & demos directly.

3. Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation brings together different technologies to undertake end-to-end automation of an organization’s complex business processes, including operations where subject matter experts were once required, under a unified and intelligent system.

Known as the core enabling technology of Hyperautomation, RPA enriched by AI and ML expands its capability in process discovery, empowering businesses to drive an unprecedented scale of automation while maintaining governance and data security.

What are the benefits of Hyperautomation?

Hyperautomation provides a more precise overview of structured and unstructured data from various business applications and operations.

This way, businesses can make better-informed decisions based on the data gathered and analyzed by automation systems, enable employees to cooperate with robots towards a full cycle of automation at a big scale, from discovering automation opportunities to measuring the ROI.

4. Digital Marketing — Image and video SEO for visual searches

As more and more users discover visual search techniques, the overall landscape of SEO will diversify along with it, spanning into Voice, Image, and Video Search. With the introduction of the AR lens (Google Lens, Snapchat’s Spectacles & more) your business can capitalize on this new trend and be within the 1st in their line of business with an established presence in each trend.

What is Visual Search?

Simply put, visual search is a search algorithm that uses real-world images as a stimulus for the online search.

The top 3 visual search engines right now are Google, Amazon, and Pinterest.

While major retailers have already grasped the power of Visual Search, it’s as important for any type of business to take advance of this trend.

Why is Visual Search important?

Here are a few facts:

* 90% of the information transmitted to the human brain is visual. (MIT)

* 13 milliseconds. The time it takes for the human brain to process an image.

* Images have an interaction rate of 87%, compared to 4% or less for other types of posts, such as links or text in Social Networks.

Here are the basics you can apply to your current SEO strategy:

Always include alt text in your image descriptions, which crawlers use to classify images.

Create a dedicated sitemap or add images to your existing sitemap, where they are even easier to crawl by search engines.

Include targeted keywords in your image file name.

Use quality images and videos, minimum HD.

5. Voice UI

The growing use of voice search started with the 1st digital voice assistant implemented in a smartphone.

Due to the development of IoT, 2021 will bring an unprecedented increase in Voice Search, not just from mobile devices but from smart speakers, smart TVs, smart displays, and other household or carry-on devices.

Furthermore, we can expect smart assistants to become more proactive, including delivering personalized recommendations to different users.

The voice and speech recognition market is expected to grow at a 17.2% compound annualized rate to reach $26.8 billion by 2025.

As voice recognition continues to improve, and usage of voice assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Google continues to grow, it will become even more challenging to stay ahead of your competitors.

It’s a good idea to learn how your business can rise on top of this trend and be prepared.

Read more about how you can implement a diversified voice search raking strategy for the main voice search engines here.

These are only 5 of the most important changes Technology will bring in 2021.

It’s incumbent on you to figure out which technologies can benefit your business and stay ahead of your competition.

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['Leonard Dumitru']
['Marketing', 'Digital Transformation', 'Trends', 'Technology', '2021 Technology Trends']