Technology plays an active role in scaling businesses. The business world’s reliance on technology has become even more essential today for small businesses seeking to survive the new realities sponsored by the pandemic. Using technology is vital for small business owners in stiff competition with bigger brands.
Large enterprises depend on tech to diversify and improve their relevance in new markets. For this reason, it’s crucial for business owners of all sizes to be on top of things regarding effective and emerging tech solutions. On that note, here are eight tech trends that will impact businesses in 2022.
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence has been a mainstay for businesses over the past decade. As AI grows, new implementation scenarios emerge, fueling the technology’s relevance for the next decade. AI is useful in numerous ways, including operational efficiency with the aid of robotic and other computer-assisted resources.
These bots can be best implemented if your human employees spend a significant part of their business hours on manual tasks like data entry. Automating your business processes with robots saves you time and money on wasteful outputs. AI is also common in the world of digital marketing. Some examples include the personalization of customer experiences.
Personalization involves harnessing real-time customer data and feeding it back to chatbots and algorithms. The AI algorithms then transform data into predictive analytics that help to anticipate issues even before customers express them. This is vital as modern customers’ commercial needs and expectations evolve rapidly.
Today’s customers are exposed to fast-paced communication and discovery avenues. So, finding and procuring new services and products happens in seconds. Overall, AI helps marketers save costs and time, become more productive, and overcome creative blocks. However, increasing the intelligence of algorithms means that marketers have to stay on the ball and adapt to the changes.
This is why it’s essential to seek the help of a full-service digital marketing agency like Keyword Performance. Bringing experts onboard can guarantee better results.
- 5G Proliferation
The world is many years shy of becoming a fully digital space. Many people look forward to the widespread use of self-driving cars and the numerous perks of innovation. 5G is a vehicle into that era. The 5G technology plays a key part in advancing the internet. But how does the 5G technology affect businesses?
5G is characterized by significantly faster data transmissions. It means customers can enjoy more seamless digital business transactions leading to more revenue. On the other hand, businesses can leverage the speed for improved services and products, ushering them into new growth markets and entrenching their brands in existing ones.
- Remote Onboarding
Statistics reveal that about 16 percent of companies worldwide operate fully remote business models. Many others complement their on-site work hours with some remote time. Generally, remote working is incrementally becoming an option for businesses of all sizes and types as more opportunities to facilitate workflows via the cloud become democratized.
Also, about 77 percent of remote workers say they’re more productive when working remotely, which is another testament to the future growth of remote work. However, the effectiveness of remote working doesn’t sway too far off what businesses would need to be efficient if they were in the office. Business owners operating remotely still need to hire the right people to support their efficiency targets.
That’s where remote onboarding comes in handy. It’s 2022, and your business has no excuse to field a poor onboarding experience for new employees because of their geographic location. Studies show that facilitating a bad onboarding process pushes over two-thirds of workers to seek new jobs.
- Software Unification
Today, every business is a software business. More than 92 percent of modern businesses have software development teams, either in-house or outsourced, whom they rely on to develop applications. Studies by the Wall Street Journal indicate that the software deployment rate increased by 68 percent as of 2018, averaging over 129 apps per company.
Managing all of these apps isn’t only stressful; different apps produce different outputs, leaving companies with multiple data silos. Software unification through integration platforms can be a great way to seamlessly manage all of a company’s applications. It affords businesses a single source of truth, ensuring access to standardized and relevant data across multiple departments.
- Accelerating Towards Sustainability
Business growth at the expense of environmental accountability has become questionable in 2022. Going green, as an all-encompassing concept, rallying stakeholders, including companies, is the world’s best bet at achieving its sustainable development targets. For this reason, businesses have to invest in choices that don’t have adverse effects on the environment.
For instance, investing in LED and CFL lighting automatic bulbs conserves energy and limits extra costs.
- Cryptocurrency Payments
The customer is always the king. Businesses are likely to gravitate toward the changing demands of customers and not the other way around. Payments are one of such highly evolving areas that have been disrupted by cryptocurrency. Crypto payments can increase your business’ reach since cryptocurrency is predicted to close the financial inclusion gap worldwide.
Crypto makes it easier for customers worldwide to facilitate their workloads via the cloud.
- The Metaverse
Conversations about the Metaverse continue to gain ground in mainstream media. But what is it and how can it impact businesses? The Metaverse is a virtual extension of the world where humans can do everything from working and playing to shopping. It thrives on concepts and technological resources like digital assets, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and the blockchain.
These concepts will change the way customers do business, and your company can end up as a lagging partaker in the Metaverse if you don’t act swiftly in securing your piece of this new virtual kingdom.
- Cybersecurity
One of the thriving use-cases of AI this year is cyber security which has become a critical challenge, especially as businesses digitalize their workflows. Studies show that over 80 percent of US companies have experienced a data breach case in the last few years. According to Inc, successful cybercrimes cost businesses leading to $400 billion in losses each year, and the figure is predicted to cross $10 trillion by 2025.
These statistics show the extent of work businesses have to do regarding cybercrimes. AI can help IT teams develop resilient data architectures to self-learn past data breaches and detect anomalies faster. Overall, organizations are ramping up their efforts to actively participate in the tech world and enjoy its benefits.
These tech trends have almost become non-negotiable for businesses seeking to make strides in the near future.