The increasingly rapid pace at which technology is evolving today makes it extremely hard but crucial for companies to keep up with every change, every bit of progress in the digital world. 2020 is just around the corner with new technologies and approaches that bring us ever closer to the 4th Industrial Revolution.

What was but a theory yesterday may as well become a standard tomorrow. From the exponential growth of the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, and immersive digital experiences to the future of data security, management, and storage, here are the eight most promising technologies you should keep a keen eye on in the next decade.

Edge Computing

Internet-of-Things systems, industrial automation, augmented reality, and other promising technologies that rely on high-performance computing require significantly lower latency to show their full potential than cloud computing can provide today.


Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm that can help IoT and the related tech bypass high latency of cloud computing by bringing data storage and processing closer to where it needs to happen—time-sensitive data computation occurs within the device itself while the rest is executed in the distributed cloud.

The idea of keeping traffic local and distributed helps companies to drastically improve response times, save bandwidth, as well as enable greater autonomy of their software and hardware solutions. One of the most successful examples of edge computing is Amazon’s PrimeAir and its package delivery drones. Drones, industrial and social robots, autonomous vehicles, as well as various automated systems, all benefit from superior interconnectivity, infrastructure optimization, and lower bandwidth costs brought by edge computing.

Artificial Intelligence

It has been one of the biggest trends in recent years and is likely to be one of the next great technological shifts. While it’s not exactly a new trend, AI is definitely something to keep an eye on considering its incredible transformative potential.

The adoption has already begun across industries—from ubiquitous chatbots to complex predictive analytics tools—and the demand for AI-powered solutions is growing at a great pace. The statistic shows that the global AI software market will reach approximately 15 billion dollars in 2020 which means AI is becoming a lot more than just a trend.

Organizations redesign their core systems, establish new business approaches, and reorganize their processes around AI solutions and their strongest cognitive possibilities: data-driven insights, data-informed decision making, and increased productivity. Today AI-powered software is an integral component of digital transformation strategies of practically every company out there. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other cognitive tools drive automation across IT ecosystems.

Whereas large corporations and wealthy organizations do have the capacity to design and deploy their own AI-powered systems, most SMEs would have to resort to different, less expensive approaches when embarking on their own AI-fueled journeys. The most realistic options to consider in 2020 are AI-as-a-service and open-algorithm models.

Robotic Process Automation and Hyperautomation

Like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is meant to make our lives easier through digital transformation and automation of complex business processes—data processing, workflow optimization, supply chain management, and other complexes, repetitive tasks that once required humans.

While automation has always been a hot topic for numerous employment disputes—recent Forrester Research report estimates that automation currently threatens about 9% of the global workforce—today merely 5% of jobs can be entirely automated.

The next step in automation will be combining RPA with the aforementioned AI, ML—as well as other automation tools, intelligent business management software, and process mining techniques—that give us the opportunity to automate processes and augment humans in even more impactful ways. This combination of technologies and processes is called hyper-automation. Such AI-fueled decision making will drive significant value and business opportunities for companies that adopt it the earliest in the next decade.

Extended Reality

AR provides an interactive experience by enhancing real-world objects with computer-generated perceptual information that you can interact with through smartphones, tablets, eyeglasses, and all kinds of other devices. VR is a full immersion into a digital environment where you interact with digital objects using special headsets with controllers or multi-projected environments. 

Finally, MR pushes AR a step forward by merging real-world and virtual experiences where physical and digital objects co-exist and users can interact with digital objects placed in the real world and vice versa in real-time.

Even though XR technologies are mostly applied in entertainment and experiential marketing today, they are changing the way we perceive and interact with the real and digital world. In 2020 and forth, these technologies are expected to be widely implemented across numerous other domains like healthcare, education, and retail.

Intelligent Interfaces

One of the most common features of these human-computer interfaces is the ability to gather data about the user, predict what the user wants, and provide them with information or services more adequate to their needs. Extensive capabilities of artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, robotics, edge computing, and extended reality in combination with human-centered design techniques open the way for a system called Intelligent Interface.

While we use these systems for giving simple commands to our smart homes and phones, businesses today successfully apply them in logistics, customer service, and field operations. So far retail and marketing are showing the biggest interest in the development of intelligent interfaces to identify customers, analyze their looks, mood, and physical behavior, as well as track their digital habits to push real-time promotions, recommendations, and target ads.

Distributed Ledger Technology

Blockchain, one of the most renowned distributed ledger technologies, has been a very controversial topic since back when Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency in the world, began on its path. Today the technology continues to raise waves of heated discussions, mostly due to overhyped projects—related to blockchain-based cryptocurrencies—that failed miserably and thousands of scams that cost ill-informed investors their fortunes.

Today corporations around the world refuse to give up on DLTs’ transformational potential as a pragmatic solution to business problems across industries and use cases. Over the next decade, these decentralized peer-to-peer systems will have the capacity to reshape entire industries.

DLTs have become their top-five strategic priority—IBM, Facebook, Microsoft, Alphabet, Samsung, Mastercard, Walmart, Oracle, Tencent—these and many more companies continue investing billions of dollars into the development of their own cryptocurrencies, marketplaces, digital IDs, supply-chain management systems, and various other decentralized solutions.

Digital IDs, data security and privacy

As the World Economic Forum stated back in 2011, “Personal data is becoming a new economic ‘asset class’, a valuable resource for the 21st century that will touch all aspects of society.” From our hobbies to transaction history, more and more of our personal data ends up in the hands of large corporations like Facebook and Google. They collect this data and use it for things like targeted advertising or even trade it with other companies which leads to disastrous cases of misuse like the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. And unfortunately, there’s not much you can do today to protect your data except completely refusing the services of these companies or going full offline.

As we become increasingly more aware of the value of our digital identity and personal information, pervasive data collection, misuse scandals, and data breaches are causing a serious trust crisis to arise. People demand more control, transparency, and traceability of their personal data, they call for stricter regulations on data collection, storage, and processing. And the next decade could be that turning point when governments take legislative action and streamline widespread implementation of new practices and technologies for our security and privacy needs.

According to the World Bank ID4D, more than one billion people in the world are unable to prove their identity and therefore lack access to vital services including healthcare, social protection, education, and finance. Worldwide adoption of Digital ID systems can change that.

DNA digital data storage

Over the last few years, the world has witnessed an exponential growth in the Global Datasphere that, according to the forecast of the International Data Corporation, will continue to grow at the annual rate of 61% and reach 175 zettabytes by 2025. Sooner or later traditional and cloud data centers will not have the capacity to effectively store and maintain these staggering amounts of data, not to mention the huge amounts of power they use for the purpose. Besides, contemporary data-storage devices are not nearly reliable enough to be entrusted with long-term storage. At some point, the world will have to adopt a whole new means of preserving and managing data.

The storage capacity and durability of DNA exceeds electronic devices by all means possible. A single gram of synthetic DNA can store over 215 petabytes of data. A very promising alternative to all those HDDs, SSDs, and other electronic devices is DNA. Like the real ones—carrying genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth, and reproduction of all known organisms on Earth—synthesized strands of DNA will be able to store the encoded data in a very efficient, stable, and reliable manner.

Though still at the early stages of development, the technology is already being effectively used to store and manage data with a small number of DNA-data-storage pioneers showing the first results. In 2016, Microsoft managed to store 200 megabytes of data in nucleotide strands of DNA.