2017 tech outlook -- and saving predictions from the digital dustbin

Anyone who has ever done any news video knows that much of what originally gets recorded winds up on the cutting room floor, or these days, in the digital dustbin. That's usually for the best and that was the case recently when myself and other IDG editors were asked to share our 2017 tech predictions, as seen in the embedded video here. But since I went to the effort of coming up with another prediction, beyond expecting 5G hype to crank up in 2017, and looked back to see how my 2016 predictions fared, I figured I'd lay that all out here. My other prediction, which was essentially thrust upon me every time I attended a conference in the second half of 2016, or more recently, peered into my email inbox, is that enterprise IT staffs are going to be inundated with requests by higher ups and end users to support conversational interfaces and chatbots. The demand for such support will rise as people become more and more used to communicating via real-time messaging systems (from texting to Facebook Messenger to Slack to Microsoft Team to Cisco Spark) and via conversational interfaces found in consumer products from Amazon Echo (5M sold in 2 years) to Google Home to Apple and Microsoft devices.