At midnight on 31st December 2019, not only will be welcome in 2020 but we will also enter a new decade! A lot has changed in the past 10 years, most notably within the world of technology. Ending the decade with the explosion of wearable technology, the rise of companies such as Uber and Airbnb and of course the trends powering them all – cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence.

As we look ahead, 2020 looks to be an exciting year for the telecommunications industry and we are sharing our thoughts on the key trends & how these will effect businesses.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most transformative tech evolutions of our time. Most companies have already started to explore how they can use AI to improve the customer experience and to streamline business operations.

This will continue in 2020, however while people will become increasingly used to working alongside AI in terms of designing and deploying their own AI-based systems, it will still remain an expensive proposition for most businesses.

It’s still recommended though that even if it’s just simply chatbots, your company has to lead the way when it comes to using AI to automate services. Not only does it emphasise superior customer service and promotes cost savings, it also reiterates a company’s commitment to new technology, which is especially important as consumer expectations continue to grow.

This demand is reflected in the adoption of chatbots within the telecommunications industry, with the ability to integrate them with your UC solutions.

5G Data Networks

The 5th generation of mobile internet connectivity has received much hype and there’s plenty of reasons why. 5G will give us superfast download and upload speeds, as well as more stable connections.

This doesn’t just give us the ability to stream movies and music at a higher quality, the greatly increased speeds also mean that mobile networks will become more useable.

Having superfast and stable internet access anywhere, presents opportunities for businesses. The increased bandwidth will enable machines, robots, and autonomous vehicles to collect and transfer more data than ever before, leading to advances in the area of IoT.

As the technology is still very much in its infancy, being rolled out to a select number of cities during the latter part of 2019, 5G should be viewed by businesses as a support to their existing wired network infrastructure instead of a replacement. Despite the opportunities and potential cost savings, it is unlikely to have the resiliency or security that many businesses are dependent upon.

The Distributed Cloud

The concept of distributed cloud is in the early stages of development, with many providers offering only a small subset of their services in a distributed way. However, according to Gartner, by 2022 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the centralised data centre or cloud – an increase from the less than 10% generated today.

This shift to a distributed cloud, where public cloud services are distributed to locations outside of the cloud provider’s data centres, allows for data centres to be located anywhere and ushers in a new era of cloud computing.

Offering low latency services where the cloud services are closer to the point of need in remote data centres or all the way to the edge of the device itself, delivering major improvements in performance and reducing the risk of network-related outages.

Natural User Interfaces

A natural user interface (NUI) is a system designed to make human-computer interaction feel as natural as possible by using software that allows the interaction to be more similar to human-to-human. Allowing users to communicate in direct ways including actions, gestures and voice commands.

Currently NUIs are used for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), although we can expect to see its growth within security using voice signatures and biometrics as forms of authentication. Additionally, as NUIs are designed to reduce complexity for users, the level of user training needed decreases, meaning organisations could adopt the technology easily.

That is how we see 2020 shaping up and we look forward to another exciting year supporting business digital transformation in Northern Ireland.

We would like to end the year by wishing all our customers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.