In the New Year, the parallel trend will be returning to work safely. There will be a better normal, but what that “normal” will be has yet to be determined. It’s probable that IoT (Internet of Things) technologies will play a prominent role in this transition. Meanwhile, as much of the workforce continues to work from home, privacy and security will be top of mind in 2021 as critical business will still need to be conducted remotely.

In the past year, technology companies have also had to step up to help in whatever way they could during a global pandemic that needed novel ways of monitoring occupancy/foot traffic and detecting elevated body temperatures. These technologies, among others, like sensors that monitor workplace air quality and promote, monitor, and/or enforce social distancing, will continue to be important as businesses map out what returning to work will look like in 2021.

Deloitte’s study suggests CFOs’ expectations for 2021 include things like a general trend toward M&As (mergers and acquisitions), broader offerings, smaller real-estate footprints, and diversified supply chains. What follows are five trends Connected World expects to see play out in the tech space in 2021.

Trend 1: Sustainability will continue to be a driving topic of the decade.

In Connected World’s 2020 trend piece, 2020 and the Decade of Enterprise Sustainability, Melissa Goodall, associate director of the Yale Office of Sustainability, said: “According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Governmental Panel on Climate Change), we have until 2030 to turn things around if we don’t want to get to the point of no return when it comes to climate change. This means we have to move beyond best practices to transformative change.” COVID-19 changed a lot in 2020, but it didn’t change the fact that sustainability must be a focus for businesses, governments, and individuals during the 2020s. If anything, the pandemic forced businesses to consider how they can leverage technology to maximize efficiencies, scale operations down, and move toward remote workforces—all efforts that can also help businesses achieve their sustainability goals.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” he says. “If you want a better environment, then you need to learn to reuse things. That’s a societal and psychological thing that we need to address, and, eventually, we will.”

Cloud computing may also play a role in reaching sustainability goals. Accenture says migrations to the public cloud can reduce CO₂ emissions by 59 million tons per year. That’s equal to taking 22 million cars off the road. Research from Gartner suggests spending on public cloud services will grow 18.4% in 2021 to reach nearly $305 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020. In many ways, the pandemic has validated the cloud’s value proposition, Gartner says, and sustainability is among the benefits enterprises see in its adoption, along with things like business continuity and cost efficiency.

Trend 2: IoT, 5G, AVs, and EVs drive manufacturing in the post-COVID era.

IoT adoption in the automotive space is moving at a different clip depending on the company, according to Laine Mears, professor of automotive manufacturing in Clemson University’s Dept. of Automotive Engineering. “There are companies like Tesla that are pushing technology more rapidly, but all of the big companies move at molasses speed when it comes to novel tech implementation on a vehicle. They are very gun-shy to potential warranty problems, which can put companies out of business overnight,” says Mears. “Look to smaller more agile and risk-tolerant companies to push the envelope (in 2021). There are enormous opportunities for AI (artificial intelligence) and self-aware vehicles to improve safety and efficiency. Automated driving is the next revolution that you are seeing starting to form. In 10 years, autonomous electric cars will be commonly available.”

PWC’s latest research on 5G in manufacturing suggests the pandemic highlighted the need for more automation and smarter, more resilient supply chains across manufacturing. 5G can deliver these benefits and more, but though the interest in there, PWC suggests many manufacturers continue to take a “wait-and-see” approach.

This means manufacturers must now deal with all different types of joints and therefore joining technology.”

This is an upheaval for the space, one that raises questions for automotive manufacturers in the next couple of decades. “It is a big issue, not only for a capital-intensive floor full of spot welders that could become obsolete, but also in selecting what technologies to use for joining,” adds Mears. “We are not sure the long-term performance of some in terms of corrosion and fatigue, so what is a carmaker to do to have reliable vehicles that last 20 years and beyond?”

Trend 3: The IoT will increasingly connect the unconnectable.

Each year, IoT growth is projected and invested parties attempt to separate the hype from the reality. In 2020, the Eclipse Foundation released an IoT Commercial Adoption Survey that suggested about 40% of organizations were already deploying IoT solutions and 22% planned to deploy within two years. IoT investments were set to grow, with 40% of participating organizations saying they had plans to bump their IoT spending in the next fiscal year. However, the year took a turn no one could have anticipated. The expectation now is that companies will still invest in IoT as long as it’s a need and not just a want.

Shiyu Zhou, a professor in the Dept. of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says in 2021, we will see more and more engineering applications of IoT technology in practice, which means more devices will be online. “Another trend in IoT will be the edge computing,” Zhou says.

“Due to the pandemic, people see more value in the remote solutions—e.g., remote condition monitoring, diagnosis etc.,” Zhou says. “Those remote solutions are based on IoT solutions.”

In 2021, the IoT will be high priority in sectors looking to connect the previously unconnected. Look for new and increased applications in healthcare, smart buildings and offices, and smart cities, among others.

Source: PWC’s “5G in Manufacturing”

Trend 4: AI will advance and drive better decisionmaking.

Up to this point, the focus of AI in commercial applications has been neural-net solutions identifying patterns in data and image analysis, according to AJ Abdallat, CEO and founder of AI solution provider Beyond Limits. This type of AI is called numeric AI. But in 2021, he expects a trend toward more sophisticated AI. “You can think of (numeric AI) as a ‘monkey see monkey do’ behavior,” he explains. “But what must be noted is neural-net only solutions cannot and do not reason. This limitation has been recognized over the last several years, but because there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit out there that only needed this kind of AI, not a lot of effort has been put on adding the missing piece of the puzzle, which is a thinking component.”

This means in 2021, the one thing you will see is the two separate schools of AI processing—neural nets and symbolic reasoning—will be united in what Beyond Limits calls ‘hybrid AI’. This is a very advanced form of AI that uses numeric AI to reduce the volumes of data to easily digestible features that the symbolic reasoners can efficiently use to achieve AI-based reasoning, not just AI pattern matching, as it is now.”

Another AI trend to watch in 2021 is delivering AI at the extreme edge, where cloud infrastructures are intermittently available and/or not fast enough to deliver realtime answers for performance-sensitive applications like healthcare. This will help drive decisionmaking where it’s most critical.

Abdallat says in 2021, AI decisionmaking will now start to include the roots of symbolic AI in their reasoning processes, so these systems will actually be able to begin to think like a person and explain their results. “Explainability is critical when you need to apply AI to any high-value asset, such as a person or expensive asset,” he says. “A fintech AI application would be relatively useless if the only thing it could do is say, ‘Buy 1 million shares of ‘X’ and sell off 2 million shares of ‘Y’ at no less than $3.25’, and when you ask why, its response is ‘I don’t know’.”

Trend 5: Smart cities will become more resilient.

Data storage, visualization, and analysis scaled to encapsulate all of a city’s systems are the next growth areas essential to creating smart and resilient cities, says Hiba Baroud, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, earth and environmental sciences, and electrical engineering and computer science at Vanderbilt University. “We have data,” she says. “Cameras, sensors, and systems are constantly capturing information from the complex, interconnected and heterogenous systems that make up a city. Our next important task is to develop the platforms that allow the vast amount of collected data to be organized in a way that provides correct and contextualized insights to facilitate smart decisionmaking.”