iPoint Insights (blog)

Did 2018 Go as Planned?

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by | Sep 24, 2018 | News & Insights

With everyone welcoming October next month (wow, time flies!), we felt it would be a good time to reflect on the new tech that has come out, and what people expected technology to do in the beginning of 2018. We did some research and found a Forbes post about the top seven tech trends we were sure to see in 2018. Let’s look at each trend and see if it was a true forecast.

  1. AI Permeation

It was assumed that AI would start to be included in everyday lives. Whether it be through apps, ways of ordering food in drive through, or through search engines. We agreed that AI has continued to grow throughout the year, but maybe not as much as expected. It isn’t something people often think about- and, we might have just moved closer to automation with people always on standby rather than AI.  What do you think?

  1. Digital Centralization

“Alexa, define that for me.” It’s true. People are relying more and more on smart technology and are looking for a way to centralize it all. Could you imagine if we could control our phones, watches, TVs, refrigerators, and all other devices with just one? Google and Amazon are trying to get there with Alexa and Siri, but we didn’t get as close as we may have expected.

  1. 5G Preparation

Well, this one is kind of clear to see we haven’t met the mark yet. It was thought of that we would be moving to a new 5G network in 2018, but so far it looks like we haven’t.

  1. Data Overload

Data is always being collected because we are always on our phones and consuming more data. It was estimated that there would be security issues and data overloads. Just ask Facebook and twitter, this happened a lot in 2018.

  1. Seamless Conversations

As we’ve seen, speaking to our devices has become a bigger thing. Alexa and Siri seem to know what we are trying to mean and can give us what we want on command. It was thought that communicating with technology would have minimum hiccups by the end of 2018…what do you think?

  1. White Collar Automation

Has your job been taken over by a robot or AI? Hopefully not. But It was believed that soon many jobs would have large AI components to it. Personally though, we haven’t really seen a big change over the last year.

  1. UI Overhauls

As we are still looking at screens and really interacting with them, there hasn’t been a crazy breakthrough of screen less technology. There’s still more time in the year though, so we’ll see.

Technology is unexpected and new changes are coming every day. We just wanted to take a quick look at what was expected to come out of this year and so far, what has truly come through to the public. What were technology trends you thought we would see for this year?