The technology industry has been very volatile over the last two years. While 2020 and 2021 were brimming with significant growth, accelerating expansion, and an increased workforce, 2022 and 2023 have witnessed massive layoffs, depleted market capitalizations, and weakening global tech spending.
The landscape in 2024 is all set up for a victorious return. Inflationary pressures are expected to decline even further while innovations catch the eye of consumers, investors, and executives through various industries. Emerging areas such as generative AI, spatial computing, and quantum computing are increasing and have the capacity to change how people live, work, and create radically.
Meanwhile, sustainability and cybersecurity rank high for tech juggernauts, and environmental impact and data safeguards are inextricably tied to industry trends and longevity.
Below, we explore the key themes that will define technology in the quarters ahead and share the key takeaways that will keep you ahead of the market.
Tech Sector Trends in Brief
- Enhanced AI and Generative AI Integration
- Spatial Computing’s Growth
- The Buzz About Quantum Computing Is Reaching Investors
- Advances In Technology For Home Health
- The Greatest Priority Is Sustainability.
- The Era Of Robotic Humanoids
- Concerns About Cybersecurity Huge And Prominent
Enhanced AI and Generative AI Integration
For over a year now, genAI has accelerated the digital transformation of any spheres-investing, researching a market, supporting customers, or designing a product, to mention just a few possible examples.
2023 was spent learning about genAI use cases, as all companies tried to compete by deploying their genAI solutions and capabilities within the already harsh competitive environment (think OpenAI’s ChatGPT).
GenAI, having become an enabler of business growth, is expected to be worth up to $1.3 trillion in market evaluation by 2032, considering the constant increase in companies embracing this technology.
Why? First, executives in all industries realize that dull tasks such as scheduling, compliance, and data organization can be performed by AI, freeing up more time and energy for workers in complex tasks.
While genAI is being touted as the miracle solution to business and operations troubles, concerns over this technology, still in its embryonic state and yet to be standardized or universally applied to the market, are on the rise. Finally, tech companies will have to fully use reliable genAI solutions and stay on top of regulatory updates to make it work for them.
Another result of the generative AI boom has been rapid growth and change in the semiconductor space. In the new genAI-driven business landscape, expanding data centers and semiconductor fabrication plants is necessary to meet the rising demand for computing power.
Simultaneously, companies like NVIDIA are pushing forward genAI technology, making it faster, cheaper, and better. GenAI and semiconductors are right on the eve of revolutionizing computing power and marking a new epoch of the high-tech sector and innovation.
Spatial Computing’s Growth
Spatial computing is a relatively new concept. According to MIT Media Lab researcher Simon Greenwold, it can be defined as “human interaction with a machine in which the machine retains and manipulates references to real objects and spaces. “
In short, this means that AI and computer vision are used in computing to mix virtual content with what is happening around us in the real world. Technologies that allow spatial computing are virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality.
Apple’s Vision Pro, Microsoft’s Hololens2, and Meta’s Quest Pro are the products of this category. As if these were not mainstream enough already, a gadget today is almost synonymous with nothing. Spatial computing devices are rapidly making their way to consumers’ hands all over the globe. It is, therefore, no surprise that the global spatial computing market is estimated at $269.8 billion by 2030, with an estimated CAGR of 23.1% from 2024-2031, far away from its 2022 evaluation of $81.8 billion.
According to a study from brokers on the AlphaPro platform, Apple’s Vision Pro is a watershed moment marking a debut in spatial computing that may change everything anyone sees or will interact with technology.
These products may remain particularly interesting novelties for more consumer use, but they have multiple applications outside of the consumer space in the workplace and educational arena.
For instance, spatial computing would enable an immersive and realistic training scenario whereby learners can practice and master various skills or tasks at zero risk. For example, medical students can learn and practice surgery, diagnosis, and treatment procedures. In the workplace, it will enable designers and engineers to conceptualize and conduct experiments on virtual models of their designs, hence saving some priceless resources. For example, car designers and engineers can test virtual models of cars without the need to create a model.
This technology market is still in its infancy and will take many years to gain heavy adoption at the household or commercial level. But 2024 will create much more noise and excitement surrounding spatial computing, particularly among investors, consumers, and ambitious companies wanting to enter this competitive landscape early.
The Buzz About Quantum Computing Is Reaching Investors
Quantum computing is as recent a concept as spatial computing, and investors, venture capitalists, and biotech and healthcare startups are increasingly showing interest in its viability. This proves that there are vast applications, from financial modeling to weather forecast, genome sequencing, drug discovery, cryptography, cybersecurity, and many more.
Funding in the quantum computing space set a record in 2023 because early investors, such as banks and financial services organizations, wanted to leverage AI systems for fraud detection, risk management, and high-frequency trading.
The topic of quantum computing has increasingly appeared in earnings transcripts found within the AlphaPro platform, where one aerospace company saw it as highly relevant technology for global security:
“I do think that quantum computing will be highly relevant, in particular when it comes to global security…if someone had a highly capable quantum computer today, they could unlock not just the security protocols or, let’s say, everything is happening on the Internet today, but they could also go back in history and unlock everything that has happened in the past.”
– Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings | Special Call 2024
Another business emphasizes the potential of quantum computing for machine learning and its capacity to handle sparse data, which would be difficult for classical computers to handle:
“One of the particular strengths of quantum computing is machine learning…As proof points, we have shown that quantum and ML models are more expressive and capture the signal better in the underlying data. We have shown that we can create equivalent or better quantum models than classical models using less data. We have shown an ability to dramatically reduce the number of iterations required to train those models using quantum. And we are now showing that quantum computers can work with sparse data where classical computing may have limits or just wouldn’t work.”
– IonQ, Inc. | Q4 2023 Earnings Call
According to calls from experts on the AlphaPro platform, leaders haven’t yet emerged in the quantum computing space. Education is necessary for people to understand the entire range of utility and benefits this technical industry offers. Another transcript from an expert points out that the greatest challenges on the road to commercializing quantum computers are scale and speed.
In any case, this technology is one to watch, as the global computing market is poised to grow at a 28.8% CAGR between 2024 and 2032 and reach around $8.2 billion by 2032.
Advances in Technology for Home Health
Medical technology, medtech, and medical devices have been steadily growing with unprecedented acceleration during the last few years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. From this came the subsector home health tech or wearable devices that enable monitoring patients remotely and utilizing telemedicine services.
A market leader, Withings designed an at-home multi-function device that can take the temperature, check blood oxygen levels, and measure and store results from a digital stethoscope. Companies like Sennheiser are developing complex sensors in wireless earbuds, claiming to track heart health with clinical accuracy besides serving as normal earbuds.
According to McKnight’s Senior Living Article, Available on the AlphaPro platform, such technology has much potential for use in the care and monitoring of seniors. Healthy living technology in the home “makes caregiving simpler, more efficient, holistic, or of higher quality.”
Beta version findings by broker research on AlphaPro: Salesforce recently entered home health tech by releasing a Home Health integration with their health Cloud software solution last year. It is a core platform for managing patient records. Ensures better communication among the healthcare teams and patients and improves patient care. Other companies will also be forced to enter home health tech to stay competitive, especially if they already have a presence in the health space.
In 2024, it will continue to flourish because technology expands and people become accustomed to the fact that health care can actually be taken at home. Clinician burnout is already on the rise because of a national physician shortage. This kind of technology will prove crucial in ensuring patients get the health support they require.
The Greatest Priority Is Sustainability
As deadlines for net-zero emissions commitments approach, sustainability is beginning to be at the forefront of the minds of C-suite leaders. In the same way, more consumers choose to invest in and buy from companies that allow them to minimize the negative impact that their choices have on the environment.
Electricity and other modes of green transport are expected to take a sizable share by 2024 while emerging carbon capture and storage technologies and renewable energy technologies will become mainstream and prominent. On the other hand, IT companies will start shifting towards low-carbon data centers in increasing proportions.
Organizations that haven’t yet transitioned to high-density cloud computing will have to do so to meet KPIs and sustainability goals,” says Leah Goldfarb, environmental impact officer at Platform. “We’ll be witnessing many more firms move toward sustainable data management this year, not only due to the environmental advantage but also operational cost-cutting.
For instance, Amazon has recently deployed almost 50 new electric trucks throughout Southern California to carry customer packages. In addition, Amazon ordered over 10,000 Rivian-made electric delivery vans, making it one of the firms that owns a massive number of electric delivery vans in America. This goes with Amazon’s plan to be carbon neutral by 2040.
The Era Of Robotic Humanoids
Humanoid robots era: we are finally here- and not just some companies, but also Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, and Figure, making huge waves in the development of humanoid robots with excellent capabilities as a diverse application in industrial factory work, healthcare, education, and more.
Already, Amazon and BMW have rolled out the use of robot “workers” in their industrial workflows. While the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is still developing safety rules for working with robots like these, there is little question that this market is expanding rapidly and becoming increasingly competitive.
As developers of robotics develop genAI and large language models to enable natural language task understanding in programming, the capabilities these machines possess will only increase from what has already been able to save lives with some humanoid robots. We will see more news on the development of humanoid robots by 2024, but more importantly, more companies are integrating this technology into their operations.
Concerns about Cybersecurity Huge and Prominent
With the ever-growing volume of newly published data, geopolitical tensions intensifying the risk of security violations, and regulatory scrutiny mounting, the importance of data protection to tech industries, their customers, and stakeholders is now more than ever paramount.
In 2024, cybersecurity, which in this case is more critically cyber resilience, will be at the top of the minds of tech leaders. This suggests that systems are in place that can facilitate data protection without a hitch, even when security is compromised. AI can be integral to automation in cyber defense and speeding up breach detection and containment.
Analysts project double-digit growth in global spending on security and risk management in 2024 and from 2023 forward due to the changing threat landscape, continued cloud adoption, patterns toward work-from-home, genAI, and changes in regulations.
Research brokers on the AlphaPro platform predict that the cybersecurity market will grow at a CAGR of 10.5% until 2028 since digital transformation is increasing the priority placed on cybersecurity.
Transcripts of earnings on the platform lead to the same conclusion:
- CrowdStrike Holdings is focusing on cybersecurity as one of the prime areas in its conversations with boards, particularly when a new regulation requiring breach disclosures by the SEC puts pressure on companies and their boards.
- SentinelOne puts the onus on how companies require modern AI-based, enterprise-wide cybersecurity; in an increasingly digital and connected world, fragmented platforms and legacy vendors draw resource utilization and provide a false sense of security.
- BlackBerry has launched its new Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Kuala Lumpur, which is designed to train a skilled cybersecurity workforce in Malaysia.