As “JE” your newest Intellyx analyst, I’m ready to bet on this year’s Intellyx Predictions for 2019. An end-of-year tradition as old as Intellyx (circa 2014) but dating back to 2002 in Jason’s ZapThink days.
I get to pick the horses this year. But before the jockeys can saddle up, I first need to clean out the stable and lay fresh hay over my own team’s prognostications from this time last year. Which of Jason Bloomberg’s 2018 predictions was the winner, and which were also-rans?
Reviewing Jason’s Predictions from 2018:
In last year’s retrospective on Charlie’s bets and his own predictions for 2018, Jason’s trifecta bet played out like this:
WIN – Blockchain Bubble Popping in Spectacular Fashion
It’s easy to say in hindsight you saw the big bust coming, but Jason really called long odds on this last year, at the exact time crypto prices were soaring (Bitcoin nearing $20K!) and ICO-based raises were outperforming VC funding by a margin of 5 to 1. As he predicted, a 2018 hangover of regulatory and tax uncertainty dogged this entire sector, and HODLers (or, investors who ‘Hold On for Dear Life’ to their crypto) had a hard time covering their losses on this selloff – much less paying taxes on the end-of-year gains. Further, since many blockchain projects were funded almost exclusively in BTC and ETH tokens, when the value of those assets dropped, so did the funding sources, and valuations, of the whole market as the sell-off continued. Sorry crypto-bros!
PLACE – GDPR Hullabaloo on This Side of the Pond
This pick would be a winner any other year, but 2018 was already favored to be privacy’s worst year. Sure, a bunch of companies outside the EU added a new GDPR checkbox to their site, and we were all inundated with privacy notice emails from every site we’ve ever browsed. But through an endless string of data breaches, social media profiling abuses and fake news scares, the lawsuits and executive exits came down hard and fast for many household tech and media brands.
SHOW – Major AI Breakthrough
Pulling up in third is the prediction of a major AI breakthrough. While there has certainly been a lot of innovation in AI, it is hard to notice. We’ve covered quite a few promising projects that are thinking deep here. However, it also seems every technology vendor is now claiming some form of AI or ML (Machine Learning) marketing wash in their messaging. Overall this category didn’t deliver The Singularity in 2018 due to all that noise, and the toolsets are still out of reach for most developers and innovators.
JE’s Predictions for 2019
You can’t lose* with my three picks of the pole. (* Please note that JE’s picks are for entertainment purposes only and do not constitute wagering advice.)
- Blockchain will emerge from the ashes like a kid who learned not to play with matches.
Evolved, higher-performance blockchain platforms will mature next year, and we will find a decentralized, immutable consensus paradigm is exceedingly well fit for certain use cases.
Vertical industry trade consortia (for instance Energy, Transport, Pharmaceutical research, some Media/IP management), global human rights and environmental interests, large and complex supply chains requiring immutable documentation, consensus among trading partners, and at least one large multinational trade alliance not involving the United States.
The difference this time? Older, but wiser kids may leave the crypto at home. Many ’tokens‘ used to exchange value will simply be another form of invoice or credit markers for payment by banks, issued against national currencies. Exceptions granted for non-profit causes and gaming.
- Application delivery will seem too complex, then become dead simple later in the year.
Did it seem like the learning curve for application delivery kept getting steeper? The methods and tools for develop-test-deploy are multiplying in the dark, and now there are thousands of novel, proprietary, and open-source ways to screw in that same lightbulb.
A general shortage of full-stack developers who must know all the latest libraries, frameworks, engines, container orchestrators, caching mechanisms — and how to configure them in 10 different scripting languages will force this situation to a head. But this summer the crisis will start to subside, thanks to results with simpler low-code application builders on fully automated, software-defined edge network infrastructure.
The real move to modernization will happen when business experts are able to not only define requirements for development, but declaratively build new applications from the customer requirements outward. We’re starting to see the first realistic interpretation and automation tools begin to bloom, and some Fortune 500 companies will wake up and smell them.
Better shared work processes (i.e. DevOps or DevSecOps) will emerge to help mixed technical and business Digital Innovation teams get more done, and the most successful teams will share their stories. Sure, we’ll always have a need for technical expertise but the highest value apps may be started by non-developers who don’t care a whit about how to ingest legacy data, or which cloud infrastructure or platform they are building on. It will just work as specified for customer needs.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) will accidentally morph into AHI
Continuing from last year’s prediction, now, everything will have AI. Or at least, everything will claim to have AI or Machine Learning: databases, factory loaders, chatbots, your refrigerator. The presence of an algorithm that reacts to changing stimuli (or data) and puts out different results over time does not a sentient artificial intelligence system make.
That limitation is not going to stop many startups and the big players from trying. There will be even faster, significant innovation in this space, and dozens of acquisitions to round up patents.
AI still won’t produce sexy, free-thinking cyborg humanoids like the show Westworld. But it will start rolling into some serious control and decision systems. It is at this point one or two major failures will occur due to AI – hopefully the inconvenient/costly kind and not the dangerous kind.
But either way, this failure moment and the fear of widespread surveillance and joblessness will cause a certain level of distrust for AI in populations, and to respond, technologists will decant some of the old AI wine into new bottles, titled ‘Augmented Human Intelligence,’ or, ‘AHI.’ The idea here is that a real person needs to be at the helm making certain decisions, and AHI should only step in to help humans when they ask it to.
The Intellyx Take
I think this coming year looks hopeful for digital transformation. Some of the bigger projects that have stayed underground will finally get on the fast track. I could make predictions all day, but nobody is interested in reading more than three.
The trick here is keeping your own mind open, and keeping your organization improving in agility and collaborative energy, so that if you are lucky enough to have an edge on the next disruptive change, you are ideally positioned to take advantage of it.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers.
