Digital Predictions 2017

The Digital Consumer

The consumer market continues to be disrupted by consumers’ usage of an expanding range of ever more powerful, faster-connected and better-specified digital devices. Innovation and integration across digital, physical and biological ecosystems are accelerating.

This growing harmonisation and integration of technologies are transforming both the way consumers behave and how businesses need to operate. User-centric design, exploiting the near omnipresence of the mobile platform, plays an increasingly important role in driving innovation. Mobile technologies have been transformed into powerful engines for change, with, for example, the introduction of dedicated machine-learning capability in the smartphone supporting the shift from the era of digitalisation to the era of cognitive automation and augmentation.

For businesses, this fourth industrial revolution is seeing the emergence of smart organisations where virtual and physical systems cooperate in an agile and flexible way. Finally, as well as the exponential pace, these emerging technologies and innovations are converging and resulting in the emergence of new competitors, meaning it is now more important than ever to experiment and understand their implications.

The six trends include:

1. Fingerprint, the biometric trailblazer As finger print reader-equipped devices are expected to top one billion for the first time we explore how this and how other biometric applications such as facial recognition are being applied to improve the customer experience – creating more efficient and secure ways of purchasing, accessing secure websites and even replacing boarding passes at airport gates.
2. Unleashing the power of machine learning in mobile devices AI and machine learning are being more skilfully integrated into devices with over 300 million smartphones sold in 2017 having on-board neural machine learning capabilities. This is significant as it will improve the ability to anticipate consumer needs and also enhance applications such as indoor navigation, speech recognition and language translation even when not connected to network.
3. The last frontier: indoor navigation made possible As the last frontier of digital navigation this technology could be transformative in a number of ways: from helping customers identify the location of retailers inside a shopping centre; helping identify product location on stockrooms or even assisting in robotic warehousing systems.
4. Automatic braking system: the road leading to self-driving In first step towards driverless cars we explore the rise of this lifesaving technology that takes into consideration traffic conditions and automatically brakes the car if a driver fails to respond.
5. 5G: the promise of a big bang in connectivity We look at how the launch of 5G is set to change the digital landscape, enabling brands to communicate with customers in real time and also how it is will pave the way for new tech phenomena such as smart cities and smart homes.
6. Increase in the severity of DDoS attacks An increase in the severity of Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks are expected with the advent of faster bandwidth speeds and increase in unsecure IoT devices, in the report we explore preventative processes organisations may adopt to minimise the threat.