4 min read

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Mar 14, 2018

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What gets you out of bed in the morning when you think of analytics in 2018? Is it the prominence of AI in our lives, democratization of data or advanced analytics that keeps you excited? Let’s accept it, last year was quite an eventful year, with the rise of self-service analytics, IoT analytics and of course chatbots becoming smarter. Having sensed these developments, 2018 should become another year of accelerated innovation in analytics industry- with some expected and unexpected disruptions of course! Excited? Without much ado read on our top four analytics trends to watch out for in 2018!

“Siri, which movie should I watch tonight? Or ‘’Google, show me the best route to reach office’’ Familiar with these everyday conversations? Just imagine your life without them! Can you? Not quite possible right? considering their impact on our busy lives. In 2017, there was so much noise around smart recommendation, with AI chatbots identifying our emotions and respond to us accordingly. Not only about the updates of weather or traffic congestion, chatbots will evolve and might also help in scouring financial operational metrics or getting answers to ‘why’ and ‘what if’ questions, thereby enabling the transformation of business as well as consumer space. Although this might take a couple of years to mature, we can anticipate few success stories in 2018 as well.

Remember in July 2016, how millions of people crashed through parks, walked over people’s graves and entered churches to hunt for augmented-reality versions of Pokémon characters. Still fresh in the memory, right? Although the Pokemon frenzy has faded, augmented reality hasn’t and we can see some more advanced and dynamic mode of AR in 2018. The human-machine interaction will boost up as businesses are already employing AR to enhance manufacturing and research processes or to offer new customer experiences. And, why does it matter to analytics industry? Well, according to Gartner’s VP David Cleary, “Augmented analytics is a particularly strategic growing area that uses machine learning for automating data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing for a broad range of business users, operational workers, and citizen data scientists.” So, yes in few years all the resource draining and time sensitive analysis will significantly become easy and smooth with augmented analytics!

IoT Analytics: A silver bullet for every industry, in 2018?

2017, was a year of huge gains in ‘’connectivity’’. There were a lot of investments and adoptions around IoT, despite security issues galore. How about 2018? Will be as exciting as 2017 for IoT analytics? Not to ignore, IoT will continue to expand this year too, with more and more devices getting connected, almost every second. Although retail, healthcare, and industrial/supply chain industries have been using IoT to boost ROI, this year we can see an increasing number of companies use IoT for more personalized marketing efforts. Additionally, Business Insider predicts business spending on IoT solutions will hit $6 trillion by 2021. Going by this predictions, we will see many venture capitalists continue pouring funds into the promise of IoT — underscoring its potential to improve customer experience in almost every industry!

2017 was a year of tremendous growth for block chain, all agree? Many believe we are already in the “early majority” phase of adoption, and that we are on the aligned towards full adoption of blockchain. And as with any new technology, the importance of the data grows. This year we might see blockchain going more mainstream with sectors such as healthcare & retail also starting to use it to handle data to prevent hacking & data leaks. According to Bill Schmarzo, CTO of Dell EMC Services, blockchain technology also “has the potential to democratize the sharing and monetization of data and analytics by removing the middleman from facilitating transactions.” So, yes organizations will accelerate their data analysis process on these virtual currencies to unmask strong trends, frauds and insights and make informed decisions!

Though it is hard to say how fast these analytics trends will manifest in our lives, we are confident that 2018 will yet again be another eventful year. There will be issues around security, governance and most importantly consumer’s ability to accept and adapt these innovations and changes. The only thing that can be assured of is this year the future will be different and very promising! So stay tuned!