CB Insights-2021年值得关注的12个新技术趋势（英文）-2021.2-58页.pdf

202112 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021CB Insights helps the worlds leading companies make smarter technology decisions with data,not opinion.Our Technology Insights Platform provides companies with comprehensive data,expert insights and work management tools to drive growth and improve operations with technology.WHAT IS CB INSIGHTS?SIGN UP FOR A FREE TRIAL312 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021Table of ContentsIntro 41.Chief prepper officer:Resilience will become a more 5 prominent corporate function as anxious companies steel themselves against unprecedented external disruptions.2.The quantum time bomb:As powerful quantum computers 9 emerge,businesses will be forced to secure data faster than these computers can decrypt it.3.Simulating empathy:Businesses will prioritize building AI 12 technologies that can interpret and respond to human emotions as they look to connect with consumers.4.Trip treatment:Technology will help usher psychedelic 19 medicines into the mainstream.5.The rise of exclusivity:Exclusivity networks will become 22 the future of social media.6.Society-as-a-service:Silicon Valley types will move beyond 27 dreams like smart cities to the literal creation of communities built from the ground up.7.The metaverse mall:Shared virtual spaces will redefine how 31 we shop and interact with people and businesses.8.Clipping crypto:Crypto rewards will reshape how brands,35 loyalty programs,and payments companies offer cash back.9.Repurposing physical space:From fulfillment centers to 39 mall health clinics to vertical farms,reimagining spaces will create an unprecedented opportunity.10.Hotelization of the office:As office culture returns,spaces 44 will be less populated and personal,and the aesthetic will shift away from the collaborative“campus”model.11.Ambient wellness:The continued convergence of health 47 and self-care will unbundle the spa and bring it into homes,shops,and beyond.12.Hospital-at-home:To fill the gaps in telehealth,expect more 52 healthcare services in the home,from house calls to remote patient monitoring to at-home lab testing.412 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021Intro“Unprecedented”;“extraordinary”;“once-in-a-lifetime.”Theres no overstating the case for how 2020 has scrambled our lives and inflated the role of technology.It has moved front and center in almost every adaptation weve made to a year of living through a pandemic.From resilience in the C-suite to bringing the hospital to the home,technology in 2021 will draft off the accelerated trends brought about by social distancing measures and stay-at-home orders.Well see wellness imbued in building design as well as more immersive and branded retail experiences in a new virtual“metaverse”dimension.There are also technology trends on the immediate horizon that have bubbled up largely outside of the extraordinary 2020 experience.AI is now table stakes for companies,and the new race will be to imbue these algorithms with emotional data that differentiates and improves the customer experience.Crypto is officially mainstream(perhaps helped along by a year of economic uncertainty and bored,home-bound crypto enthusiasts),so much so that we see payments companies embracing bitcoin as the new rewards points currency.Exclusivity and futuristic tech havens built from the ground up are also taking off,while psychedelic medicine could this year be where medical cannabis was less than a decade ago.In 2021,much will depend on the pace of vaccination and how quickly or slowly we find our way out of the pandemic.As we do,technologys centrality across our behaviors is more assured than ever before.And while some individuals may embrace a post-pandemic luddite retreat,for organizations,2021 will likely be a year of technological refinement and retooling,as lessons learned on the fly inform a more thoughtful,less frantic embrace of the technology trends reshaping industries.512 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021Resilience will become a more prominent corporate function as anxious companies steel themselves against unprecedented external disruptions.Persistent threats like climate change,cyber warfare,and much more could turn the world upside down again.Companies shaken by the pandemic will start prioritizing resilience and turn to emerging tech as they look to onshore operations,build robust supply chains,and ready themselves for the next big crisis.Industry leaders like Bill Gates warned for years that a severe pandemic was coming,but nobody knew when it would happen and,as such,many businesses were caught off guard and had to scramble to flesh out remote work strategies,diversify suppliers,and build e-commerce alternatives to brick-and-mortar stores.But pandemics are far from the only large-scale threat the world will have to contend with.The prospects include:Extreme weather increasing in severity and frequency due to climate change.Cyberattacks crippling electricity grids or other infrastructure.Major volcanic eruptions blocking out the sky and grounding flights.Depending on the scale,any one of these events,and many more,could jolt the global economy overnight.1.Chief prepper officer612 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021Given this deluge of risks,and shaken by the colossal ongoing ramifications of Covid-19,more corporations are becoming preppers.The term“resilience”was mentioned a record number of times on earnings calls last year as execs discussed responses to the pandemic,and trends like“digital transformation”and“onshoring”often seen as ways to help counter volatility have taken on new urgency.One approach companies are taking is rethinking supply chains,either through bringing operations closer to home or broadening geographic distribution to limit reliance on a single country.Apple has made moves to make more of its devices in Vietnam,while Foxconn,one of its biggest suppliers,announced last year it would invest$1B to expand in India to help it diversify away from its China-based factories affected by trade sanctions and coronavirus lockdowns.Many businesses are also turning to tech like AI to gain a better understanding of their operations,predict demand fluctuations,and respond more quickly to changing circumstances.712 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021Startups in the space are gaining traction.Supply chain visibility company project44,for instance,raised a$100M mega-round at the end of 2020.Meanwhile,RELEX Solutions,a CB Insights Retail Tech 100 winner,has raised$224M in total disclosed funding for its AI-driven platform for demand forecasting and inventory management.Source:RELEX Solutions Some food companies are thinking about supply chain resilience from a different angle by turning to alternative proteins after being bruised when Covid-19 upended livestock value chains.Compared to rearing animals,alternative protein supply chains can be shorter and established closer to densely populated cities where a lot of food is consumed.Energy production is another area where some corporates are looking to protect factories and value chains from uncertainty.Manufacturing sites that run off locally installed renewables,like Teslas solar-powered“gigafactories,”neednt worry quite as much about a cyber attack or hurricane bringing down an electrical grid though a persistent ash cloud from a volcano could cause a few problems.812 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021 Source:Tesla Diversity of options,with a splash of redundancy,will be essential to riding out the worst storms.Aspiring chief prepper officers might want to keep that old landline installed.912 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021As powerful quantum computers emerge,businesses will be forced to secure data faster than these computers can decrypt it.Quantum computers are becoming exponentially more powerful and more widely available.In 2019,Google became the first quantum computer maker to achieve“quantum supremacy,”which refers to running a calculation on a quantum computer dramatically faster than any conventional computer could ever manage.The tech giant said it solved a problem in just a few minutes that would take a classical supercomputer 10,000 years to complete.Just over a year later,a team in China claimed to also have achieved quantum supremacy,this time completing a computation in 200 seconds that would otherwise take about 2.5B years 100T times faster.More broadly,equity deals to quantum computing startups set a new record of 37 rounds last year,an annual increase of 42%,as the number of players in the space grows.2.The quantum time bomb1012 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021Though quantum computers could soon transform industries like healthcare,finance,and logistics,the industrys rising momentum is creating an arms race to secure data faster than quantum computers can decrypt it.This is because a powerful enough quantum computer could quickly overcome common internet encryption protocols like RSA,which use prime factors of large numbers to protect online data.This could cause problems on a scale far beyond even todays slew of high-profile data breaches.A hacker with a decent quantum computer could access sensitive materials like emails,e-commerce payments,medical records,and more as they are shuttled around the web.Even some blockchain networks which are seen as relatively secure and are quickly being adopted by enterprises could eventually face serious challenges to the integrity of their records.In response,new encryption methods to counter quantum computers are starting to emerge including some being developed by major tech players like IBM and Microsoft.Referred to collectively as“post-quantum cryptography,”these techniques tend to be built around problems that quantum computers arent expected to have many advantages in solving.The US-based National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST)is planning to recommend post-quantum cryptography standards next year to help organizations adapt,a much-anticipated move that will fuel implementation and help support interoperability.In the meantime,the UK governments National Cyber Security Centre recently recommended that enterprises start planning for post-quantum cryptography by identifying systems to prioritize for a transition,though warned against anxious companies rushing to adopt non-standardized approaches a potentially tempting option for industries like finance which have a lot of money riding on the security of their online transactions.1112 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021Some are also spying an opportunity.Startups like ISARA,which has raised$27M in total disclosed funding,and University of Oxford spinout PQShield,which raised$7M in seed funding in July 2020,are among the growing number of companies competing to help businesses move to post-quantum cryptography.Source:ISARA Many industry observers think that todays encryption will be good enough for a decade or more,but others fear an unforeseen breakthrough could significantly cut into that timeline.In any event,the complexity of updating IT infrastructure is a further incentive to move quickly and update to a new encryption protocol that will soon be necessary.The stakes of a quantum computer undermining many of todays commonly used encryption standards are high countless everyday e-commerce transactions and even sensitive government communications could be vulnerable and the damage could be much more widespread than todays headline-grabbing data breaches.Imagine millions of shops,hospitals,and banks around the world that could no longer ensure the privacy of their online systems.1212 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021Businesses will prioritize building AI technologies that can interpret and respond to human emotions as they look to connect with consumers.Over the last decade,artificial intelligence has gone from buzzword to a must-have business competence.From retail to healthcare to financial services,AI is penetrating nearly every industry,with advances in deep learning,computer vision,and more paving the way.AI,though,has largely been challenged when it comes to recognizing and reacting to human emotion.In fact,the AI Now Institute at New York University called for a ban on the use of emotion recognition tech“in important decisions that impact peoples lives and access to opportunities”in its 2019 report.But the attempt to use AI to recognize and respond to emotion,or emotion AI,isnt a new concept and in 2021,as political and social pressures continue to push tech companies to account for a wider range of human experiences,emotion AI will become an increasing priority.The idea is largely associated with American scholar and inventor Rosalind Picard and her early research on the topic also known as affective computing,or“computing that relates to,arises from,or deliberately influences emotions.”Today,the$87B global market for affective computing has far-reaching potential,and interest in the space has been gradually building.3.Simulating empathy1312 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021 Machines employing emotional artificial intelligence attempt to interpret human emotion from text,voice patterns,facial expressions,and other non-verbal cues and in many cases,simulate those emotions in response.In tapping into unspoken behaviors and reactions,businesses can leverage this“emotional data”to increase their gains and better cater to customers.Source:Accenture1412 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021Emotion AI company Affectiva,for example,has found that advertisers are becoming increasingly effective at drawing out emotional responses from consumers:“From our work with 70%of the worlds largest advertisers and 28%of the Fortune Global 500 companies,weve found that emotionally resonant ads improve sales results.”GRAHAM PAGE,GLOBAL MANAGING DIRECTOR OF MEDIA ANALYTICS AT AFFECTIVAThe tech could also change how companies interact with customers.Companies like Behavioral Signals and Cogito use emotion AI to analyze elements of speech,like tone and vocal emphasis,to best match service agents and customers across industries.Source:Cogito 1512 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2021Widespread adoption of the tech could also feed into industries like medicine.For example,researchers are using deep learning techniques to capture facial expressions of pain to help detect discomfort,an especially useful approach for when patients cannot verbally communicate.Others are leveraging AI emotion detection software to determine levels of joy or negative emotion of facial palsy patients,pre-and post-surgery.In another example,Amazons health and wellness tracker Halo integrates voice analysis and machine learning to analyze how positive or energetic users sound based on emotions like happiness,sadness,or excitement in their voice.While still in the early stages of development,emotion AI tech for the automotive industry also has tremendous upside potential.Computer vision is already being leveraged for driver monitoring,where systems are being built to help identify