A fundamental shift is on the way for businesses that want to apply mission-critical digital innovations and deliver disruptive transformations. Gartner Vice President David Cearley believes that when the digital evolution happens consistently, fresh business models can align closely with partners, customers, and employees.

In Gartner 2017 Symposium/ITxpo, Cearley said, “Technology will be embedded in everything in the digital business of the future.” So it is time to analyze the top technology trends that will push an enterprise’s performance to the next level in 2018 and will reshape the digital world.

The Disruptive Intelligent Digital Mesh

People, content, devices, and services come together to form an intelligent digital mesh. This mesh is empowered by businesses platforms, digital models, and a smart set of services. In short, it is about decoding the science behind building flexible autonomous systems thriving in a digitally connected environment; the mesh lets its components interact through the connections between people, devices, content, and businesses. Now, here are the latest technology trends that every forward-thinking enterprise should know.

Engineered Intelligence

 - AI Empowers Digital Initiatives

AI is improving decision-making and reinventing digital ecosystems and business models. With engineered intelligence, robotics, businesses, products, and people are all set to change the way the world moves. This disruptive intelligent technology has all what it takes to transform businesses in unique ways that have not been witnessed since the industrial revolution.

As per Gartner’s latest report, Artificial Intelligence, if holistically harnessed, can possibly improve the payoff received from top digital initiatives through 2025. In a recent survey done by this research firm, close to 59 percent of the enterprises are gathering information to rebuild top AI strategies while the remainder of the companies are working toward adopting or piloting fresh AI solutions.

Narrow AI, including high-scope machine-learning solutions, enables enterprises to perform a specific task such as driving vehicles or understanding a language in a controlled environment. So AI is poised to disrupt a number of verticals with the help of well-designed algorithms.

- The Dawn Of Intelligent Apps And Services

In the coming few years, many apps and services will be leveraging engineered intelligence at some level. Whether it is ERP or any other software, AI will start running in the background to improve the application’s efficiency. Cearley further notes that businesses will find innovative ways of introducing AI into packaged software so that it adds tremendous business value for its customers.

These intelligent applications are generally designed and deployed to create an intelligent intermediary layer between systems and people. Through a well-designed intelligent application, the structure of the workspace or the work can get completely transformed.

With these smart apps, human activities can be seamlessly augmented or improved. For instance, augmented analytics is an evolving area for those businesses that are involved in machine learning for discovering fresh insights and automating data preparation.

- The World Of Intelligent Things

When things start embedding AI and machine learning, they get interesting, intelligent, and efficient. Some of the intelligent things will never exist without AI; however, a few things have already existed before AI and have been made intelligent through its concepts. For example, a camera, which existed before AI, became a smart camera when it was reengineered with intelligent principles and algorithms.

The examples of AI can be found in many things, these days. The world is full of autonomous farming vehicles and self-directing vacuum machines. Whenever a product is made intelligent with specially designed AI algorithms, it will operate autonomously or semiautonomously for a specific period to finish a particular task.

Intelligent things are evolving rapidly; due to this, a powerful shift from standalone intelligent things to a collection of collaborative intelligent products is on the horizon. When the time comes, the world will see a number of devices working collaboratively either with the help of human input or independently.

Digital Drivers

- Digital Twins Improve Businesses

Put simply, the concept of digital twins is about creating a highly immersive virtual environment merging short-, long-, and medium-term planning objectives. This change helps in bringing considerable value to business decisions. With digital twins, enterprises can create a quality virtual model of a product, service, or process.

This blend of physical and virtual worlds enables enterprises and decision-makers to analyze and monitor processes and systems in real time. By leveraging digital twins, businesses can easily head off a number of operational problems even before they occur. As per the estimates given by Gartner’s report, 21 billion connected endpoints and sensors will be present by 2020; this fact will, further, strengthen the concept of digital twins as they will be implemented in billions of things in the coming time.

Here is how the concept of digital twins works. First off, this upcoming technology is simply a robust bridge existing between the digital and physical worlds. If a business wants its particular system to have a digital twin, then the company has to fit a variety of smart components into its structure. These components will have different sensors that can gather data about working conditions and real-time statuses.

Afterward, the components will send the data to the cloud where a number analyse will be done to predict the best course a business can take with its respective system. When a virtual environment imitates real-world decision-making, businesses can uncover a lot of hidden opportunities.

- Computing Gets The Edge

Information and communication technology is evolving to push a number of computing applications, allied services, and data from centralized systems to embedded networks. Behind this shift is edge computing that enables enterprises to control processes and generate analytics at the data source itself.

Edge computing embraces a unique computing topology in which content/information is collected, processed, and delivered by being close to the source of the data. However, this form of computing faces a lot of latency issues, connectivity challenges, and bandwidth constraints; these challenges, however, can be easily surmounted by distributed models. Also, this computing variety delivers unmatched functionality to businesses.

This form of computing favors distributed models. Businesses should start using a number of edge design patterns in their infrastructural architectures. In this architecture, there will be a number of IoT elements to unlock the full potential of edge-oriented networking capabilities.

- When Commands Become Conversations

Digital assistants are everywhere, and they work at the user’s command. However, what if these commands transform into conversations? Well, then things will become much more realistic, efficient, and enjoyable. Enter new conversational platforms. These platforms, which are engineered using AI, make a series of commands a conversation.

These platforms use deep machine learning and sophisticated algorithms to go much beyond simplistic commands and develop a rich multi-turn conversational dialogue. Different conversational platforms are designed to truly understand the needs, wants, and desires of the users.

These systems or platforms can answer the simplest of questions How’s the weather tonight? and can work on a complicated request Book a table for two at an Italian restaurant near my location. And that is just a beginning because these platforms will revolutionize a number of industries.

A primary challenge for a number of conversational platforms remains the way users communicate. Even now, the users have to communicate with these platforms in a structured way making the entire experience frustrating. However, research is underway to make these platforms robust by using advanced conversational models and APIs to access, invoke, and manage different third-party services and deliver complex outcomes.

- Developing Immersive Experience

VR, AR, and mixed reality are transforming the way people, products, and businesses interact in the digital landscape. When these human-built realities will be combined with different conversational platforms, there will be a necessary shift in creating enriching user experience.

Application vendors, e-commerce development platform vendors, and system software vendors will compete to deliver immersive experience to users. In the coming few years, the focus will be on creating mixed reality. In mixed reality, the users will create immersive experience by interacting with the real-world and digital objects while maintaining a definite presence in the physical world.

Mixed really is created along a complete spectrum and comprises different head-mounted displays compatible with VR or AR technologies; today, there are several tablet- and smartphone-based AR available too. Since mobile devices are everywhere and since more and more tech giants, such as Apple and Google, are jumping on the AR/VR bandwagon, the trend will heat up this year.

The Connected Mesh

- Blockchains Reimagine Decentralization

Being a distributed, shared, tokenized, decentralized ledger, blockchains remove any type of business friction by remaining independent of third-party participants. This interaction allows a number of untrusted parties to perform commercial transactions. The technology has hosted a number of applications, bitcoins for one, and has the promise to completely disrupt several verticals.

The applications based on this decentralised technology are used in different sectors such as government, supply chain, content distribution, social media, and much more. Nevertheless, the technology is unproven and immature and is largely unregulated. For implementing a blockchain properly, a business should have a clear understanding of its different capabilities, the opportunities it may be targeting, and the technology’s limitations.

Much before working with this distributed-ledger technology, the business should make sure that its team has the right cryptographic skills to explore what is and is not possible. Also, the enterprises need to identify the points where they can integrate this technology with their existing infrastructure.

- Utilizing Event-Driven Moments

Many businesses depend on the ability to pinpoint and exploit fresh digital moments. So a business’s events basically reflect the discovery and exploration of these notable states or moments; for example, the completion of a specific purchase order can be a moment.

Some commercial combinations or events constitute a variety of business moments such as a situation that is detected to call for a few specific actions. The most significant business moments are the ones having the implications for several parties including the lines of businesses or partners and separate applications.

As new technologies such as IoT and AI are emerging, commercial events can be simply detected and can be analyzed in detail. Most progressive companies have already started incorporating “event thinking” as part of their overall digital strategy. By 2020, nearly 80 percent of digital business solutions and 80 percent of innovative ecosystems will need event processing.

- CARTA Is The Evolution Of Next-Gen IT Solutions

Digital businesses are required to develop and maintain an ever-evolving always-on security ecosystem. With the use of highly sophisticated pieces of technology comes a sudden rise in the threat potential. Can these threats be mitigated? Yes, they can be prevented with the help of continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment (CARTA).

CARTA allows businesses to make real-time decisions involving a certain level of risk and trust. The technology leverages adaptive responses for security-enabled digital businesses. Traditional security techniques and technologies usually use control and ownership instead of trust. That is why these techniques will never work in the digital landscape.

Putting perimeter and infrastructural protection in place will never ensure accurate detection and will never protect the system from behind-the-perimeter attacks that are done by insiders. Here, CARTA comes into play as it empowers developers to take people-centric security measures. By integrating DevOps with security, CARTA delivers successful DevSecOps processes.

These technology trends are strategic and have immense disruptive potential. By successfully applying these tech trends, businesses can easily set the stage for a number of digital innovations in 2018. So enterprises should analyze these trends and realign their business models and strategies to get the intelligent digital edge.