Even before the advent of the iPhone, consumer technologies have been leading and impacting the corporate technology landscape. This convergence could be observed best the second week of January, when 1.800.000+ visitors attended the CES® 2018 in Las Vegas to learn from more than 3.900 exhibitors about consumer and business tech and its use cases as well as impact on society.

Our tech scouts from Arthur D. Little made their way through CES® (and the darkness of a power outage) to identify the trends that should be on your personal (and corporate) radar in 2018 – and what things you should know for the future. As to key technological takeaways, we see past hypes, that have, by evolutionary advancements, been put on a solid basement (e.g. VR/AR, AI) – but disruption is not everywhere and we do all still cook with the same water! For digital business, the ecosystem (e.g. around the car, for your gadgets) is still eagerly anticipated– but solutions remain vertical and traditional battles remains (e.g. Alexa vs. Google Home).

Eight takeaway from Las Vegas

Five roles of technology trends … 

• 5G enables everything cities, AI, vehicles and health
• AI, the real life ironman enhancing humans / decision-making in every life aspect
• Data flows exponentially sources never end, structure is the real value!
• Autonomous is the new black in the air, on land, in the factory and even in the kitchen
• Immersive kills the desktop AR/VR, speech & gestures control

… three ways of digital business:

• Hardware makers go data from network equipment to digital health, from chips to AI libraries
• Traditional battles no horizontal war yet; the battle is still over the solution
• No breakthrough but coordinated evolution updates and upgrades for many solutions
   

Executives should not be overly optimistic, nor, on the other extreme, intimidated by trends and new technologies, but strategically monitor the situation with their company-specific technology radar.

By this means, CIOs and CTOs will be ready to quickly deploy autonomous driving (i.e. level 5 by 2021), 5G (i.e. widespread by 2022) or human level AI (i.e. by 2024). The impact on corporate processes is immediate; eventually traditional products will be disrupted and singular solutions move aside for ecosystems.