Robots, cognitive computing, smart machines, and a new internet of things architecture are only a few of the highly digital shifts that businesses can expect to see in the coming years.

1. Rise of the smart machines:
Gartner’s top tech predictions for
2016

2. Introduction
Imagine the Terminator handling your customer support requests; Wall-E
managing your inventory; C3PO writing your marketing materials…
It sounds ridiculous, but in this age of digital business, robots and smart
machines are becoming an increasingly common fixture in the workplace.
Here are five of Gartner’s top tech predictions for 2016 and beyond, and how
they could affect your growing business.

3. Businesses will ramp up their recruitment of smart machines
“45% of the fastest-growing firms will have fewer employees than smart
machines by 2018 – Gartner”
Large enterprises: have the financial resources necessary
SMB: agility, more likely to be able to quickly adopt and adapt to these technological changes
Examples:
● Customer support
● Personal assistants
● Writers

4. Robots will become copywriters for marketing departments
“By 2018, 20 percent of all business content will be written by machines,
according to Gartner”
Content Marketing: Web copy, press releases, reports, white papers, e-books, articles, ...
Robotic writers: cut costs on writers, reports or press releases, risk of sacrificing creativity, what’s
already being produced.
Example: Automated writing technology is already being used by the AP to produce sports stories.

5. A wave of hack attacks on digital signage is coming
“By 2018, 20 percent of smart buildings will have fallen victim to digital
vandalism”
‘Smart buildings’ : digital signage, automated lighting and heating, smart surveillance systems ...
Preventing these types of threats will lead to the creation of ‘digital officer’ roles which will use
algorithms to, for example, detect and avoid obscenities.

6. Virtual assistants will rule in a post-app era
“By 2020, virtual assistants will carry out 40 percent of mobile
interactions”
Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs): Siri, Cortana, Google Now...
Will evolve to become infinitely more helpful than their current ask and tell capabilities.
How: collect and use data about a person’s mobile content, usage, and behaviours to
anticipate a user’s “needs” with little to no user action required. cf. predictive analytics

7. Customers will be the biggest cloud security threat
“Through 2020, 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s
fault”
Security is the taboo topic of the shift to the Cloud.
Biggest threat: not the Cloud itself but the way in which people and businesses are using it
Examples:
● employees with poor security practices (weak password),
● using public cloud security to store consumer data
Solution: educate customers and employees about the best security practices to ensure that their data–
and your company– is safe.

8. Conclusion
While these predictions may seem far-fetched, the shift towards everything
digital over the past ten years is amplifying at a rapid rate.
The most important thing is being able to embrace them so that your business
can be prepared to meet its customers and clients where they’ll actually be: in
the digital space.
Beyond that – prepare yourself for the robopocalypse.

9. Thank you!
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10. Original article
Rise of the smart machines:
Gartner’s top tech predictions for
2016