Five Technology Trends to Look Forward to in 2022

There's no stopping the freight train that is technology — a facet of human life that is continuously evolving. When a company rolls out a game-changing update to one of their flagship products, we might find ourselves already imagining what that device might be like the following year. In today’s digital world, we're more expectant than surprised when it comes to technology trends.

We're on the verge of the new year, so let's take our time in looking back at some of the biggest trends in technology in 2021 before we look forward to 2022.

A lot of advancements in the digital world took place this year, but here are some that created sizeable waves of interest.

The Internet of Behavior, or more known as IoB, is an extension of the more traditional Internet of Things (IoT). By gathering data and information through wearable gadgets, users' online interests and other electrical devices that can be connected to the Internet, IoB reveals an analysis of these users' behavior and preferences. According to Gartner, IoB will be able to track the individual activities of 40% of people worldwide by 2023.

Blockchain has done an excellent job of constantly adapting to the changing times. According to the 2021 Global Blockchain Survey done by Deloitte, 76% of executives around the world believe that in the next ten years, digital assets will be viable alternatives for traditional currencies. The emergence of non-fungible tokens (NFTS), digital identities, decentralized finance (DeFi) and Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) characterized blockchain's growth in 2021.

The year 2022 presents another time of revolution in the digital world, especially with these five trends in technology leading the charge.

If you combine the fields of decision engineering and data science, decision intelligence is what you get. According to Gartner, decision intelligence is a new kind of business intelligence (BI) platform that brings in artificial intelligence, machine learning, social science and even managerial science to help people make smarter business decisions. Moreover, decision intelligence reduces biases, provides a wide array of options to solve a problem and presents decisions that are backed up by data and analytics.

If you want advanced technology to create new content based on existing images, text or audio, then you should tap into the magic of generative AI. Generative AI allows computers and machines to extract the underlying pattern of a subject, then utilize that data to generate a similar output. Generative AI can be used in upscaling and restoring old films, generating life-like photographs of human faces, converting photos to emojis, converting texts to images and face aging.

Do you worry about protecting your personal information online? It's a good thing that privacy-enhancing computation (PEC) — a technology that specializes in protecting data — now exists. Privacy-enhancing computation limits data sharing, which in turn protects data and other information from being copied or attacked by hackers. With privacy-enhancing computation starting to emerge as one of the rising technology trends, acquiring top-class security for data and private information just got a bit easier. On the other hand, hackers will now find it more difficult to gain access to information without being granted permission.

What do you get when you mix and match the capabilities of machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and other event-driven software architectures? You get a powerful engine called hyper-automation — an advanced technology that helps automate a wide range of business and information technology processes. If you're tired of doing repetitive tasks for your business, hyper-automation will help you by automating your processes, decisions and other business processes. According to Automation Anywhere, hyper-automation will be able to make an impact in the fields of insurance, banking, healthcare, manufacturing, life sciences and even in the public sector.

With many businesses and companies going digital post-pandemic, the need to secure their networks and online premises has also increased. One of today's trends in technology is the rise of cybersecurity mesh, which Gartner described as a "flexible, composable architecture that integrates widely distributed and disparate security devices". By deviating from the more traditional one-walled security or firewall, cybersecurity mesh provides a more specific and more responsive defense against potential cyber-attacks. It provides a capable defensive wall to protect a company's critical infrastructure and network, while also making use of the Internet of Things (IoT) tools.