Technology Trends for the real world: from AI to hyper-automation

Nowadays, it is essential (not to mention fascinating) to always keep up with innovation and technology in the business world, what developments are coming down the pipeline, and where the cutting edge is aimed. At VASS, we have been focusing on analyzing these trends and folding them into our own projects, clients, and market movements.

Just this year alone, there have been explosive advances in B2B tech. Artificial Intelligence, Digital First, hyperconnectivity, hyper-automation, and Cloud are the foremost. And beyond progress for its own sake, customer experience is the constant guiding star in technological advancement in business. Below we take a closer look at how these technologies are evolving and where we are heading.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is the most well-known of these recent developments, and is present from technical forums to everyday life. And this is because the implications of possibility offered by this technology are near infinite. Models like GPT-3 are already being developed that aim to be sophisticated enough for automatic code generation, universal language translation, predictive and learning dictation, and more.

Ethics & AI

Now, as with any major technological advancement, AI goes hand-in-hand with ethical questions. In the AI arena, the primary question regards a given model’s comprehension and critical problem solving when forming its list of priorities. In short: how will these systems make their decisions? Take automated cars: when faced with an unavoidable collision, which driver, which passenger should be given preferential treatment? On a more macro scale, is it necessary to set limits to AI through ethics and regulation? And as with any tech-based ethics conundrum, the problems presented confer huge risks onto the companies and brands that answer them.

User experience and Digital First

Although much has already been said about the concept of the omnichannel, companies now aspire to be primarily digital when dealing with their customers. COVID-19 has shifted this development into overdrive.

Naturally, this has become a primary target of growth for user-centric technology. For example, work is being done on the analysis of documents uploaded to platforms to nurture single entry, simplify processes, build personalized paths to the client using AI, etc.

Innovations have even come down the pipeline to address more abstract aspects of the business-to-customer relationship, such as mood or sentiment. By analyzing language, systems are now able to assess a user’s mood with increasing levels of accuracy. At this technology’s cutting edge is the use of voice and auditory interaction, in an attempt to improve of clunky automated messages of yesteryear. Developments like these help brands define themselves to their customers more and more each day.

Hyper-automation focused on operational efficiency

Processes are a fundamental part of companies, and for this reason, we are working deeply on their automation through robotization (RPA) in order to fulfill all types of objectives. Some primaries:

• Cost leadership.
• Increased efficiency.
• Generating greater demand and, therefore, higher sales volume.

In recent months, this automation and introduction of intelligence in processes hopes to dramatically increase operational efficiency, accompanied by an objectively better customer experience, eventually leading to a decrease in churn or turnover. Incorporating solutions such as Process Mining (also AI-based) makes it easier to analyze any given model for potential weaknesses and predict what any changes might bring.

Developments in Cloud Computing

Within Cloud Computing, we find different applications or approaches, such as Cloud development, that avoid ad hoc configurations and configure infrastructure deployments only through the code (infrastructure as code). We also find in this field the growing need to properly secure containers, manage the lifecycle of, or maintain mixed or hybrid architectures within companies. 

Within this type of trend, we could also speak of large Event-Driven projects with queues and event management or Data-Driven, with everything related to data and the Data-Centric concept to solve the data available within companies.

How We Make it Work

All these technologies evolve every day, emerging new proposals and solutions that can change understanding the processes and experiences within companies. At VASS, we are constantly attentive to our customers’ changes and unique needs to develop tools adapted to the real world that solve real problems and add value to companies. The observation must be constant because in a world as changing as the technological one, today’s cornerstone tomorrow may be different. Innovation is a continuous process that never ends, and it is precisely there where the key to success for organizations lies.