At Anders, we have been working with tech for over ten years and have read these articles for a long time. After a while, everyone noticed that a pattern is starting to emerge. You pick the top hot things in tech right now, put them in a blog post, and go on your merry way. So, let’s try something different, instead of copying what everyone else is writing, let’s analyze if what they say actually could be what we will see in 2020.

Everyone and their dogs have been interested in getting into machine learning. Still, when push comes to shove, many companies have not been able to reap the benefits of AI and get stuck in only “trying it out.” We at Anders do not think this is because AI and machine learning, in particular, does not work; on the contrary, it does wonders, but it is the invisibility of it that makes it hard to grasp. It is just something that runs there in the background that people don’t understand.

We are going to start seeing more services that provide companies with ready-made machine learning services that they can use. While things are still “running somewhere in the background,” now there will be services such as IBM Watson or the Finnish based Silo.AI that can tell you what it does and how it does it more straightforwardly.

One of the hot things in automating things right now relates to Robotic Process Automation (RPA). If it is not on a 2020 hotlist, then someone has just forgotten to put it in there. RPA makes it easy for non-developers to emulate the way a human would use the software, and by doing so, automate specific processes. The key selling point here is that a lot more people than just developers can make use of it, making it a very cost-effective way to automate things within companies.

Where money is saved, executives follow, or how did the saying goes again? Automation is an area that will see a lot more growth during the coming year as it often has an obvious business case, and the ROI can be calculated in a more relaxed way than many of the other technology trends out there.

With GDPR alive and kicking, California’s CCPA in place, and companies scratching their heads when it comes to how to provide a user with all of their data, transparency is becoming a real selling point when it comes to services today. Putting the user in the center and letting them control the flow of data is slowly becoming the norm as more and more regulation is put in place, and consumers are becoming more aware of their data and about online privacy.

Privacy, transparency, and traceability while not the sexiest of topics are still going to be hot stuff in 2020.

This year, Blockchain has once again stirred up some things with two new cryptocurrencies Facebook Libra and Telegrams Gram. The general talk about Blockchain has been a bit more visible this year due to these, and the term Blockchain is found in almost all of this year’s “2020 hot tech” lists. However, Blockchain is not just cryptocurrencies; the main benefit of Blockchain is that it gives a transparent chain of transactions. Be it for any data and that the data in the chain cannot be altered.

While still on the hot tech lists, there are not many companies using it in a production environment. It is even more cursed than machine learning when it comes to the “trying it out,” as companies struggle to find proper use cases for Blockchain. These things are the main reasons we do not see Blockchain as one of the hot trends anymore and of cool tech that has yet to find its real purpose for other things than cryptocurrencies.