By Holger Reisinger, SVP of large enterprise solutions at Jabra

AI and Improved Tech

Over the next year, I expect to see significant improvements to many technologies that we're already familiar with. Specifically, AI will be transforming the value of these technologies to make them more usable and wide-reaching. From voice assistants, to office tools and wearables, the sophistication of technology across our consumer and professional lives is evolving. Complaints and frustrations we might have had in the past will start to disappear. It's an important time as we learn how to work with these new systems and ensure we're gaining the full advantages.

Empathy in the machine dialogue will become very important. Voice assistant adoption will be massively improved if you get a level of empathy in that machine dialogue. Alexa and other players will likely become more emotional and detect things like frustration in user responses. This, in turn, will make the tool more effective in communicating and supplementing human representatives.   

A new type of health tech. There will be a lot of stories around health tech, but not in the traditional ways. People think of health tech as measuring your heart rate, but I think the next step is using tech to help people where mobility or cognitive skills are diminishing. AI will help people with things like memory, medication reminders, accessibility, or even anxiety.

The digital assistant will also undergo an on-the-go revolution. We're on the brink of a new phase that will be at least 50 percent better. We're seeing significant investments by Google, Apple and Amazon and in turn, voice UI development by major service providers like McDonald's, Uber, etc. The reality of 2020 is going to be a lot about creating triangles or rectangles where you connect software services and new ways of doing things with hardware. For example, better ways to navigate your music or banking services with just your voice.

Better utilizing video collaboration. In the enterprise domain, there is now a strong trend in video collaboration. IT leaders are looking for plug-and-play solutions that will see faster adoption. There is a lot of interest in the intelligence features that can be leveraged to make companies and buildings smarter, with things like people counting and occupancy for next-level business intelligence. People will begin to think differently about how their companies operate.

Return of wearables. Wearables like eyewear will come back and there will be a massive shift towards augmentation and mixed reality. We've taken a dramatic step up on components and hardware. The wearables return will be approached with more energy, drive and players. 

Voice UI will continue to grow even more rapidly. There is a lot of investment in that space and we know that from a tech perspective, there will be enablers in smaller form factors, so it sets the foundation for 2020 to be a year where voice interaction on-the-go can really start to happen. Whilst adoption of voice services has been increasing at home, it has not been as widely adopted elsewhere but we are now bridging that as we cross the next tech hurdles to enable widespread adoption.

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About the Author

Holger is the senior vice president of large enterprise solutions at Jabra. With more than 25 years in the IT and telecommunications industries, Holger is passionate about increasing knowledge workers' productivity and ability to more effectively concentrate, communicate and collaborate. In 2016, he published "Get Sh*t Done" in collaboration with Dr. Louise Harder Fischer at Copenhagen Business School, exploring the current state of and future of work.