A Look Ahead to 2019 - Key Predictions From Our Podcast Guests

This year we’ve covered a lot of ground in our Momenta Podcast series. We reached out to a few of our guests to ask them “What are your top 3 ideas, themes, or predictions for 2019?” We share the responses below:

Richard  Soley : CEO of the  Object Management Group,  Executive  Chairman of the  Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC)  , and founder of the  IoT Solutions World Congress:  

1. The most obvious is the coming integration of technologies like AI and DLT (blockchain) into IoT.  The demand for distributed trustworthiness will focus work on DLT's, and the immense demand for integration of petabytes of data in real-time will cause dependence on AI. 
2. Likewise, essentially unrelated technologies that are nevertheless interesting (e.g., quantum computing and 3D printing) will climb aboard the IoT bandwagon to take advantage of the visibility. 
3. Lastly, there will be general recognition in the coming year that IoT is just one component of the digitalization of the enterprise and the lessons learned by IIC testbeds will help organizations make the transition! 
    

Guido Jouret, CDO of ABB: 

With Moore’s law running out of steam, we will see 2 consequences:  

1. A proliferation of new hardware innovations: GPUs, FPGAs, neural net hardware, vision hardware, etc. 
2. We will finally shift more innovation to programming languages to take advantage of this new hardware so we can unlock productivity in new ways.

Wienke Giezeman - CEO & Co-founder, The Things Industries shared his top predictions: 

1. IoT is going to find more and more maturity.
2. At the end of the corporate innovation manager, corporate innovation is going to find its way to the business lines. 
3. Consolidation in the IoT market, if 9 out of 10 IoT PoC fail, businesses will follow. 

Max Borders – Author and Founder of Social Evolutions shared his top three predictions for 2019: 

1. We'll see the first working dApps (Distributed Applications) come on to the wider market, 
2. These above will start to change institutional investor perceptions of DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies), 
3. The market for DLT/Blockchain will start to heal.  

Vivek Wadhwa, Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School and Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering at Silicon Valley: 

1. Digital medicine reaches a tipping point with the forays of the tech industry into medical diagnostics and advances in genomics.  
2. The Apple Watch now has the ability to detect atrial fibrillation, hypertension, and sleep apnea. A new generation of apps is able to detect emotion, assist with fitness and meditation, and diagnose other aspects of health. Medical records are being digitized and clinical trials will be managed from smartphones. The technology industry is about “eat” medicine, to take a dominant role in the trillion-dollar healthcare market.  
3. The cost of genomic sequencing is beginning to approach that of a regular blood test. In oncology, scientists are using DNA tests to find out whether a patient’s tumor carries clinically useful mutations that make cancers vulnerable to particular drugs and to match individual patients with available therapies or clinical trials that will most benefit them. Treatments developed for one type of cancer are being used to treat other cancers with similar gene mutations. With data on millions of patients, we will not only be able to cure rare cancers but most other diseases. The breakthroughs will begin to happen in 2019 because we are gaining the information necessary for the analysis and testing of new cures.  
4. Artificial Intelligence will begin to move from the hype phase to reality. Today, AI in business is like teenage sex: “Everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.” Even though AI systems can now learn a game and beat champions within hours, they have been hard to apply to business applications, most of the claims we have read about in press releases have been PR stunts. This will begin to change in 2019, with real applications of AI and real solutions. Some of the core deficiencies of machine learning will also be overcome and businesses will learn how to clean up and integrate their data. Some will understand what AI really does and create a vision for its use, they will begin to see the big benefits. 
5. The crash of Bitcoin will set off the Blockchain Winter. Just as we saw the implosion of artificial intelligence in the 90s, after it missed the ridiculous expectations that were set for it, we will see this happen to crypto and blockchain. Companies will feel embarrassed by the announcements they made about their blockchain projects and will retrench. Eventually, after the dust settles and better technology solutions emerge, there will be a generation of useful applications based on blockchains. But this hype cycle will soon end. 
   

Want more predictions?

Please join the Momenta Partners team for a special webinar that will examine top themes for 2019. This special presentation will highlight the most relevant topics related to Connected Industry and Digital Transformation with a state of the market and outlook for 2019. 

What you will learn:

• AI/Machine Learning – From Hype to Value
• Edge Computing: At the Center of Innovation
• Autonomous Vehicles at our Door
• The Low Power Revolution of Unpowered Assets

You will not want to miss this event. Presenters include Ed Maguire, Jim Fletcher, Ken Forster, and others from the Momenta team!

Momenta Partners encompasses leading Strategic Advisory, Talent, and Investment practices. We’re the guiding hand behind leading industrials’ IoT strategies, over 100 IoT leadership placements, and 17+ young IoT disruptors. Schedule a free consultation to learn more about our Connected Industry practice.