In interviews with more than 100 digital and technology leaders on the Technovation podcast in 2022, executives shared the technologies and trends they believe have the potential to deliver significant value to their organizations in the years ahead. For the fourth year in a row, analytics, machine learning/AI, and cloud were the top three trends on executives’ radars.
A closer inspection of the interviews finds that more analytics use cases are bearing fruit across organizations as teams place greater emphasis on data strategy and governance. Developing solid data foundations enables new capabilities and opens the door for AI and machine learning at scale. We expect to see this focus continue in the year ahead.
Some new trends also began to emerge this year, including the metaverse and IT’s growing role in environmental sustainability and other ESG initiatives. There is also continued interest in the new ways of working and the tools and practices that will bring them to life. See below for more on the trends that are rising in importance in the year ahead.
Companies across industries are increasingly leveraging machine learning models to make sense of the large amount of data they collect. Today, machine learning capabilities are “not just niche to businesses that try to answer decision support-like type questions that rely on predictability,” said Neal Sample, former CIO of Northwestern Mutual. “Entire industries are being upended by better thinking around data.” What does this better thinking look like? Increasingly, it means leveraging data and analytics capabilities to deliver differentiated products and services for customers.
Anil Bhatt, Global CIO of Elevance Health (formerly Anthem Inc.), detailed how AI helps deliver better customer experiences through personalization. The symptom triage function in the company’s Sydney Health App, for example, can identify the symptoms a member is experiencing and analyze why they are reaching out for care, helping them receive personalized care more quickly and driving higher member satisfaction.
Similarly, Rite Aid’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Justin Mennen, notes that advances in AI and machine learning “are driving a completely different level of personalization.” Through the company’s partnership with Google, Rite Aid is using data and analytics to drive insights for the business and for customers, including tools that help customers choose the right medical products based on where they are in their journey.
The continued rise of data and analytics capabilities brings with it a continued need for talented team members to drive those initiatives forward. Ashok Srivastava, Intuit’s Chief Data Officer, began the journey to advance AI nearly five years ago by investing in skills development and recruiting. “We built this team of artificial intelligence scientists and engineers and we focused them on what matters most, and that means what is best for the end customer,” he said. One win came from merging data and AI teams. “We could see that that data platform was powering a lot of experiences and as we focused those data platforms on AI and then on analytics, we could see that tremendous benefits were coming out of it.” Some of these benefits included Intuit’s “follow-me-home” approach to personal finance, in which AI models use data to understand how the customer is using the product, automatically categorize customer transactions, and provide insights to the customer about their financial health.
Check out our compilation of other technology leaders on Technovation with Peter High speaking about how their organizations are using artificial intelligence:
A new trend that has intrigued (and puzzled) some technology executives is the metaverse. The concept has been around for a while (see Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash and the virtual world of the Wachowski sisters’ 1999 film The Matrix), but only recently has it emerged in a business context. Today, we see executives largely focused on the adoption of digital twins and augmented/virtual reality tools – two technologies often associated with the metaverse – for use cases ranging from product development to employee training.
Susan Doniz, Chief Information Officer of Boeing, says the company sees benefits of digital twin technology, noting that the combination of physical and digital worlds allows the company to efficiently iterate on new designs, to “fly the airplane thousands of times before we really fly it, and build it thousands of times before we really build it.” At Raytheon, Chief Digital Officer and SVP for Enterprise Services Vince Campisi and his team are using digital simulations of factories to optimize facility usage.
Technology leaders recognize the need to stay up to date on emerging metaverse-related technologies, from digital twins to AR/VR and Web3. “Not all of it is always relevant in the moment, but if you don’t start to get yourself up to speed and know where the opportunities lie, then I think you find yourself at the tail end,” said Cindy Hoots, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Information Officer of AstraZeneca. Her team invested in an experience-based group at AstraZeneca called ‘XR’. “Whether it’s the virtual reality or augmented reality team, we’ve got our own metaverse environment looking at how digital twins that we already have play into that, and just trying to build up some internal muscle on some of these trends.”
The metaverse, whatever form it may take, also creates new opportunities for collaboration and culture building, particularly in hybrid environments in which many work remotely. Likening the impact of the metaverse to that of ‘dilithium crystals’, the material used in the Star Trek universe to power warp-speed faster-than-light space travel, Cummins CIO Earl Newsome said the technology can act as a “transporter” of sorts, bringing people together from across the world. “I think we’re going to be able to leverage the metaverse to do some of that,” he explained, “especially when the metaverse gets to be really mixed reality.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, cybersecurity remained top of mind for business technology leaders in 2022. As attacks grow more prevalent and sophisticated, CIOs continue to focus on mitigating risk and building a culture of cybersecurity awareness across their organizations.
At Cummins, Earl Newsome is training his team to minimize the number of preventable cyberattacks through the CyberSMART program, which equips “cyber soldiers” with the tools needed to sniff out phishing schemes, be more aware of their surroundings, and improve password management. “The issue is either on two legs or two wires,” Earl joked. “The two legs issue is the one that we need to focus on because 82% of all cybersecurity issues have a human element in them.”
The other 18% of cyberattacks may pose trickier to prevent, but CIOs are looking to new technologies and tools to help identify when attacks are occurring and mitigate the risk of exposure. Mike Feliton, CIO of Crocs, sees an opportunity with machine learning and RPA to quickly detect when an attack is occurring. “Noticing when a brute force attack is hitting your organization and being able to shut that down before any of your employees have to get engaged is essential because we can cut it off before anything starts to explode.”
More sophisticated attacks are likely to trouble some companies as computational capabilities advance. As research and development in quantum computing evolves, it is time for organizations to plan for post-quantum cryptography, said Kevin Stine, Chief of the Applied Cybersecurity Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Information Technology Laboratory. With the rise of quantum computers, even the most secure systems today could be at serious risk of being breached without new forms of protection.
Yet while quantum computers create the risk of more advanced cyberattacks, they also offer the benefit of more advanced cybersecurity measures. Sangy Vatsa, Global Chief Technology & Digital Officer of FIS, is excited about the possibilities quantum can bring to the cybersecurity landscape.
While not a “tech trend” we have typically tracked across podcast episodes, sustainability appeared much more frequently this year as executives contemplated IT’s role in contributing to enterprise ESG initiatives.
Consumers are now, more than ever, concerned with how a company is addressing these issues, particularly in the energy sector. “Customers are paying attention to what companies are doing […] in terms of sustainability,” said Dak Liyanearachchi, Head of Data and Technology at NRG Energy. He noted “the decarbonization of our economy” as a trend that stands out.
“It really doesn’t matter what you think about climate change and sustainability, you are going to deal with it,” said Edward Wagoner, CIO of Digital at JLL. For technology leaders, the focus is on how best to do it. To name one example, Edward noted opportunities organizations have to use IoT and sensor technology to measure water and energy usage and reduce waste.
Companies are pursuing other technology-led sustainability solutions. Earlier this year, Frank Cassulo, Chief Digital Officer at Chevron, discussed Chevron New Energies, a business unit launched late last year that aims to produce low-carbon solutions (e.g. hydrogen) and reduce carbon emissions for both customers and internal operations. “We’re really looking at where we have competitive advantages and how we can help accelerate that energy transition,” he said. “It’s exciting for us to both think about how we continuously improve delivering the products today, but also transitioning to a lower carbon future that we’re going to play a large part in.”
While the energy industry is put under the microscope when it comes to sustainability, it certainly isn’t the only industry that is looking at lowering carbon emissions. Avery Dennison CIO Nick Colisto has been the primary driver of sustainability both within IT and within the business. In his view, IT is uniquely positioned to be a driver of sustainability at a company. “We incorporated [sustainability] as one of our strategic priorities in IT,” Nick said. “It’s essentially about innovation in building products that satisfy recycling, composting, and reuse of single-use consumer packaging and apparel in our products and in our solutions.”
At Avery Dennison, a low-code technology system called AD Circular makes it easier for customers to recycle used paper and filmic label liners across Europe. The company also introduced atma.io, a cloud platform that uses connected-product technology to track products through the value chain.
In addition to the topics noted above, other trends show signs of gaining traction in 2023:
Stay tuned to Technovation in 2023 for more discussions about the transformative technologies driving organizations forward.
