The top five 2022 technology trends for finance executives have been gathered out of annual technology forecasts by the Committee on Finance & Technology (CFIT) Emerging Technologies (ET) Subcommittee.
Each year, the ET Subcommittee conducts a survey of these annual technology forecasts by the top accounting and consulting firms. The subcommittee reviewed ten surveys and five trends clearly rise to the top.
The first trend, AI, was mentioned by almost every forecast. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer or a robot controlled by a computer to do tasks that are usually done by humans because they require human intelligence and discernment.
Potential Business Advantages to Leveraging AI
- Reduce Inherent Human Bias: Recruiting, Hiring [Liberty Advisors], Tech, Banks, Healthcare [Forrester Predictions]
- Fraud Detection [KPMG]
- Test Hypotheses/Algorithms in simulated environment “Mirrored World” [Accenture]
- Can AI be Patented/Profitable [Forrester Predictions]
- Targeted Marketing – more narrow customer groupings, Increased productivity, lower cost [KPMG]
- Strategic Partnering to Leverage Shared Data [Deloitte]
Applications for AI in the Spotlight
- Speech, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision [McKinsey]
- Exponential Intelligence – Understanding Human Emotion and Intent [Deloitte]
- Conversational AI, NLP helping companies eliminate manual work [PwC]
- Micro AI Systems to meet specific needs v. massive systems [Accenture]
Potential Challenges
- Tech Adoption, Keeping Pace, Cost [KPMG]
Trustworthy
- Explainable/Secure [IEEE]
- Compute at the Edge: Federated AI (learn at source without aggregation) [IEEE]
- Security of AI Data and AI at the Edge [Deloitte]
Focus on Quality Data + Accessibility
- Availability / Quality of Data and Maintenance [KPMG]
- Automatic updates to data/models/applications [Gartner]
- Data-centric: Data available everywhere and data-centric ML [IEEE]
- Need for more and higher quality data as the foundation for AI [Forrester]
- The second trend was Cybersecurity. The state of being protected against the criminal or unauthorized use of electronic data, or the measures taken to achieve this.
Urgent Priority for Businesses [PwC]
- Increasing sophistication of cyber criminals coupled with expansive use of digital technologies emphasizes cyber’s importance. Cyber needs to be baked into business decisions.
- 49% of UK companies felt better and more granular quantification of cyber risks was a likely outcome of the pandemic. By better quantifying cyber risks, cyber spend can better align to the most serious threats and risks.
- Businesses need to build resistance by investing in incident response plans as threat intelligence data shows threats are increasing.
- Many businesses plan on expanding their cyber security teams.
Cyber Impact of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine [Gartner]
- Increasing use of destructive malware attacks.
- Threat of attacks to critical infrastructure with the potential for fatal outages.
- Critical infrastructure is interdependent and a cyber-attack on one can have impact on others.
- Businesses need to prioritize cybersecurity planning, focus on what they can control, and ensure incident response plans are current.
- The traditional network centric, point solution security tools are no longer considered sufficient to combat complex and organized cyberattacks.
Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) [Verizon]
- Top three patterns of breaches are social engineering, basic web application attacks, and system intrusion.
- Top three patterns of incidents are denial of service, basic web application attacks, and social engineering.
- 85% of breaches involve a human element.
- 61% of breaches involved credentials.
- External threat actors continue to be a greater risk over internal or partner threat actors.
- Financially motivated attacks continue to be the most common and actors categorized as organized crime continue to be number one.
- Phishing continues to be a top action used by threat actors.
- Older vulnerabilities continue to be exploited by attackers. Organizations need to patch smarter by using vulnerability prioritization.
- More organizations are identifying breaches in days or less than in the past.
- Attackers are becoming less likely to target payment data and more likely to broadly target any data that will impact the victim’s operations to increase the likelihood of a ransomware payout.
- The third trend was Cloud/Cloud Native. Digital transformation requires balancing business, technology, and strategy. Cloud solutions and services can help you gain the capabilities you need to engineer advantage.
Rise of Cloud Native using containers (instead of VM) and serverless (Forrester)
- Cloud native soon to be core of enterprise cloud strategy
AI at the edge – federated with the support of the cloud (IEEE)
- Convergence of HPC/AI/HPDA delivered on heterogeneous hardware serverless
- Moving from bare metal and VM to containers and now FAAS (Functions as a Service)
Cloud Native Platforms (Gartner)
- Technologies that allow you to build new application architectures that are resilient, elastic and agile
- Improve on the traditional lift and shift model applied to cloud, which fails to take advantage of cloud benefits and adds complexity to on-going maintenance
Stack Strategically (Accenture)
- 90% of business and IT executives agree that to be agile and resilient, their organizations need to fast forward their digital transformation with cloud at its core Heading
- Microsystems - designing small solutions instead of massive ones, giving more flexibility and increasing speed (incl API code library for essentially open use)
- Cloud spending in the first quarter of 2020 was nearly triple that of the previous year, and by November, 70 percent of companies using cloud had plans to increase spending due to the disruption
- Info
Cloud goes vertical (Deloitte)
- Over the next 18-24 months, the expectations is to see a growing number of orgs across market sectors begin exploring ways that industry clouds can help them meet unique vertical needs
- Industry clouds can help companies keep pace with technology and regulatory changes with less effort, freeing up talent for more value-added projects
- 72% of IT leaders already use edge computing, and Gartner predicts that by 2025 more than 50% of enterprise managed data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud
- The fourth trend was Blockchain. A system in which a record of transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are maintained across several computers that are linked in a peer-to-peer network.
Rise in Applicability
- Rise of the NFT Ecosystem [Liberty Advisors]
- Digital assets have evolved rapidly over the past decade, gaining momentum through a proliferation of new use cases. [EY]
- 80% say their industries will see new revenue streams from blockchain, digital assets, and/or cryptocurrency solutions [Deloitte]
- Automating trust – when used in conjunction with other technologies such as IoT and AI, blockchain can be very effective [PwC]
- Manufacturing, healthcare, utilities, and any tech-enabled corporate reporting where providing transparency to investors, regulators, and customers is necessary in addition to reducing the potential for risk.
Increased Adoption
- Widespread adoption of blockchain for peer-to-peer payments
- Corporations are already adapting to create platforms for the growing blockchain environment [Liberty Advisors]
- JPMorgan Chase recently announced that it will team with Singapore’s DBS Group and Temasek to form a blockchain payments platform in a bid to ease cross-border payments, trade and currency settlements [EY]
- Crypto- and blockchain-related startups alone attracting more than $15 billion during the first three quarters of 2021 — up 384% from all of 2020 [EY]
The fifth trend was Automation. “A framework to build, orchestrate, and govern a hybrid workforce of humans, digital workers, robotics and traditional automation components” –Forrester 2022 Predictions for Technology Leaders.
Moving from automation patchwork(RPA, etc.) to a designed in inclusive “automation fabric”) [Forrester 2022 Predictions]
- Pair with evolving from Digital Transformation to Human Centric Transformation to unlock human potential and gain 3-5% efficiency and undo “human collateral damage” from earlier first transformation projects.
- Incorporates the other Key Trends of AI, Blockchain, Cybersecurity to deliver on automation fabric potential
Emergence of Data Fabric [Gartner Top Strategic Trends 2022]
- A design concept that is an integrated layer (the fabric) of data and connecting processes. Utilizes continuous analytics over existing, discoverable, and inferenced metadata to support integrated and reusable data across all environments.
- Provides for a flexible, resilient integration of data sources across platforms and business users, making data available everywhere it’s needed regardless where the data lives
- Data fabric can use analytics to learn and actively recommend where data should be used and changed by continuously identifying and connecting data from disparate applications to discover unique business relevant relationships between data points.
Move to next-level process automation & virtualization [McKinsey Top Trends in Tech]
- 50% of today’s work activities could be automated by 2025
- Involves Industrial IoT, Robots/RPA, Digital Twins
Following are the 2022 Technology Surveys Reviewed:
ACCENTURE
DELOITTE
ERNST & YOUNG
FORRESTER
GARTNER
IEEE
KPMG
LIBERTY ADVISORS
McKINSEY
PwC
Additional slides with detail on each of these surveys are available upon request.