Theme No. 1: AI imperatives and risks drive organizations to protect themselves
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Business benefits: A virtual workforce of agents to assist, offload and augment the work of humans or traditional applications.
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Challenges: Requires robust guardrails to ensure alignment with providers’ and users’ intentions.
Trend 2: AI governance platforms: Technology solutions enable organizations to manage the legal, ethical and operational performance of their AI systems.
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Business benefits: Create, manage and enforce policies that ensure responsible use of AI, explain how AI systems work, model lifecycle management, and provide transparency to build trust and accountability.
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Challenges: AI guidelines vary across regions and industries, making it difficult to establish consistent practices.
Trend 3: Disinformation security: An emerging technology category aimed at systematically discerning trust.
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Business benefits: Decreases fraud by strengthening controls for validating identity; prevents account takeover through continuous risk scoring, contextual awareness and a continuous adaptive trust model; and protects brand reputation by identifying harmful narratives.
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Challenges: Requires a continuously updated, multilayered, adaptive learning, team approach.
Theme No. 2: New frontiers of computing prompt organizations to reconsider how they compute
Trend 4: Post-quantum cryptography (PQC): Data protection that is resistant to quantum computing (QC) decryption risks.
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Business benefits: Protects data from the security risks that will come with the advent of quantum computing.
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Challenges: PQC algorithms are not drop-in replacements for existing asymmetric algorithms. Current applications may have performance issues, will require testing and may need to be rewritten.
Trend 5: Ambient invisible intelligence: Technology unobtrusively integrated into the environment to enable a more natural, intuitive experiences
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Business benefits: Enables low-cost, real-time tracking and sensing of items, improving visibility and efficiency; potential for unforgeable provenance and new ways for objects to report identity, history and properties.
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Challenges: Providers will have to address privacy concerns and obtain consent for some types of data use. Users may opt to disable tags to preserve privacy.
Trend 6: Energy-efficient computing: An approach to increasing sustainability through more efficient architecture, code and algorithms; hardware optimized for efficiency; and the use of renewable energy to run systems.
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Business benefits: Address legal, commercial and social pressures to improve sustainability by reducing carbon footprint.
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Challenges: New hardware, cloud services, skills, tools, algorithms and applications will be required; migrating to new computing platforms will be complex and expensive; energy prices may rise in the short term as green energy demand increases.
Trend 7: Hybrid computing: Combines different compute, storage and network mechanisms to solve computational problems.
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Business benefits: Highly efficient, high-speed, transformative innovation environments; AI that performs beyond current technological limits; autonomous businesses powered by higher levels of automation; augmented human capability allowing real-time personalization at scale and use of the human body as a computing platform.
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Challenges: Nascent, highly complex technologies require specialized skills; a system of autonomous modules introduces security risks; involves experimental technologies and high costs; need for orchestration and integration.
Theme No. 3: Human-machine synergy brings together the physical and digital worlds
Trend 8: Spatial computing: Digitally enhances the physical world using technologies like augmented and virtual reality to offer immersive experiences.
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Business benefits: Addresses consumer demand for immersive and interactive experiences in gaming, education and e-commerce; satisfies demand for sophisticated visualization tools for decision making and efficiency in healthcare, retail and manufacturing.
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Challenges: Head-mounted displays are expensive and unwieldy, require frequent charging, isolate users and may increase the potential for accidents; user interfaces are complex; data privacy and security are major concerns.
Trend 9: Polyfunctional robots: Robots capable of performing multiple tasks and seamlessly switching between them as required.
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Business benefits: Improved efficiency; faster ROI; no need for architectural changes or bolt-down infrastructure means fast deployment, low risk and scalability; can substitute for or work with humans.
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Challenges: The industry hasn’t yet standardized on price or minimum functionality required.
Trend 10: Neurological enhancement: Improving cognitive abilities with technologies that read and decode brain activity.
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Business benefits: Human upskilling, safety improvements, personalized education, allowing older people to work longer, next-generation marketing..
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Challenges: Initially expensive, limited battery and options for mobility and wireless connectivity; invasive and risky; UBMIs and BBMIs interface directly with the human brain, creating security challenges; ethical concerns (e.g., altering users’ perception of reality).