Pete Hanlon, CTO of Moneypenny – What is The Future of Tech For 2022?

We speak with Pete Hanlon, CTO of customer-service specialist, Moneypenny who predicts that clarity, understanding, quantum computing and securing the supply chain will be at the heart of business success in 2022.

Embracing the right technology has been instrumental for sustained business success this year. As for the future, I don’t have a crystal ball so I can’t predict what the future will look like, however, I do know that technology is advancing quicker than ever before, and never more so than in the field of communication. It’s given us more options to create better ways to communicate and generally pull us into a new world of opportunity. 

The challenges of the last years, for all their anguish, have actually brought to the forefront what can be achieved and what is on the cusp of being achieved in communication. More than anything, it has highlighted that we value human interaction. By combining high quality people with great technology, together these two elements will shape the way the world works as we step into our new future. 

Taking this into consideration, here are a few of my suggestions for the technologies that could change the business landscape in 2022: 

1: COMPUTERS WILL BETTER UNDERSTAND US

Over the past few years technology companies such as Google, Facebook and OpenAI have been releasing increasingly complex natural language models to power Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. These language models are the foundation for much of the improvement we see today allowing computers to extract meaning from written text. To give some idea of the rate of innovation, language models such as ELMo released in 2018 had approximately 94 million parameters. 

Think of a parameter as a neurone in the human brain. Today we are seeing models such as Megatron from NVIDIA with 530 billion parameters and we expect the upcoming GPT-4 model from OpenAI to have 100 trillion parameters. To put that into context, the human brain has an estimated 86 billion neurones. As these models increase in size, they pick up more information about how we structure language, the relationship and meaning of words and the intent of sentences. 

It means going beyond supervised learning to reach human-level intelligence, meaning, in turn, that they will be better at understanding us, organising and processing information and engaging in intelligent dialogue. 

2: AI WILL BECOME EXPLAINABLE

As AI systems and Deep Learning models become ever more complex, it becomes increasingly challenging to explain how systems make predictions. Deep learning models are often trained on billions of data items. However, if we want to understand why a complex model gave a particular prediction it’s almost impossible to do in a way that is understandable to humans.

In order to trust AIs that drive our cars and help run our lives, we need to be able to understand the processes they went through to make a prediction. We may trust the autopilot on our cars, but it comes with responsibility, and you want to know what it will do when it has to make a decision.

Just as decision-makers in big business, who are using AI to analyze insights and deliver better predictions, they need to understand why in order to be accountable. 

This is a big area of research by all of the large tech companies and many research groups and I expect this to be a field of research that will improve significantly over the next twelve months. 

3: MASS ADOPTION OF NO-CODE / LOW-CODE PLATFORMS

For as long as I can remember we’ve been talking about tools that allow people with no formal programming background to write computer programs. The idea was first raised in the 70s, but the systems back then were just too complex. However more recent low-code, no-code platforms are making it significantly easier to write programs to automate processes within a business. 

If you can work with an Excel spreadsheet, there’s a good chance you can develop complex solutions using these new platforms. In traditional software development, programmers needed to build an application from scratch, requiring expertise, time and money. Low-code platforms, especially cloud-based will shorten this development process, helping businesses to be more agile and work smarter, perfect for the new way of working.

We are starting to see the mass adoption of this technology and I expect it to continue to rise in popularity over the following year, effectively democratizing the ability to automate business processes. 

4: SECURING THE SUPPLY CHAIN

Most companies have been doubling down over the past few years to improve security and reduce the threats of cyber-attacks but an area that has been largely forgotten is securing the supply chain. Every piece of software we install within a business has the potential to become a cyber threat. For example, the SolarWinds attack in 2021 impacted up to 18,000 companies including Fortune 500 companies and multiple agencies in the US government, all from the fact that the SolarWinds software had been compromised by cyber criminals. 

The impact of cyber threats coming from trusted companies in our supply chain is enormous. It is critical that the software that drives the digital ecosystem is secure and resilient, protecting our digital advances and equipping us with the tools to combat existing and ever-evolving threats. Mitigating risk in the supply chain will be a huge area of focus in 2022. 

5: QUANTUM COMPUTING RESEARCH WILL CONTINUE TO BREAK NEW GROUND

Quantum computing is an exciting field within technology at the moment. These computers are capable of solving certain classes of problems significantly faster than conventional computers and the potential for this technology is vast. 

In 2019, Google announced in the Nature Journal that they have achieved Quantum Supremacy. This means they have solved a problem on a Quantum Computer that would have taken a state-of-the-art supercomputer years to complete. Since then, there has been some challenge around the validity of this claim however the field of quantum computing is a hot topic and will be a game-changing technology that will start to creep into our lives over the next few years. It has the power to impact all industries, transforming business models and it is happening. Leaders need to educate and equip their businesses with the tools to embrace it and look to the future. 

6: OUTSOURCING WILL INCREASE

The pandemic has taught us to focus on what we do best and bring in experts when we need specific solutions. Businesses that adopt this model can grow, innovate and pivot faster which makes them more competitive in the constantly changing and evolving business environment we all operate in. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has been growing over the years, and it is a trend that will definitely continue to grow. It offers continuous innovation, agility and cost-efficiency, it makes perfect sense. What is more important, however, is in accepting that the future is in working together, in close partnership, an integrated extension of business.

To find out more about MoneyPenny, visit: www.moneypenny.com