As 2022 is now here, tech personnel and firms must take note of the new trends in the software productivity space and adjust accordingly to meet the growing expectations of the market. The future is uncertain, and if we have learned anything from the past several months is the value of being prepared for the unexpected. There are key trends especially in the areas of remote working, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and outsourcing that must be considered. The freedom and ability to operate from anywhere will be permanent in the future of software development. An article by Computer Weekly suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the growth of remote work among developers, with a reduction of office working by 74% since the pandemic hit.

Has enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) lived up to the hype generated at a decade's worth of industry conferences? Or is it coming up short? Maybe putting the word "enterprise" in front of AI just adds up to a marketing spin. It depends on how individual businesses deploy AI. When companies adopt AI wisely, they do more than shift repeatable tasks and processes from humans to more efficient computers.

The year 2018 and beyond is all set to witness an upward trend for professionals with skills in emerging technologies into Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine learning and Deep Learning. Professionals with emerging technologies capabilities will continue to be the most sought after by recruiters and business enterprises in 2018 and beyond. With an increasing impetus on Digital India, the analytics and allied industries will be in need of 50 percent more workforce. According to TeamLease Services, a leading recruitment company, Artificial Intelligence alone will create 2.3 million jobs globally by 2020. AI with its inherent capabilities to successfully analyze both structured and unstructured data will help companies offer customized solutions and instructions to employees in real-time.

The mobile app development industry is growing at a rapid pace, with more and more enterprises opting for mobile apps to empower their business operations. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence technology is a major milestone for mobile apps. And now that developers realize the need for creating differentiated apps, they are keen to embrace AI to make their apps stand apart in the competitive landscape. Several app development firms are building AI-based apps to help business enterprises to achieve their goals. With the introduction of this smart technology, a number of innovative apps ranging from automated customer service like chatbots to high-end data science apps, are already making inroads into the market.

Though businesses are adopting exponential technologies for automating redundant operations and efficiently utilizing enterprise data, HR (Human Resources) has been one of the most important support functions that was not known for espousing much of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality and other powerful tools until now. The impact of the new wave of change brought about by the fourth industrial revolution has been propelling and profound in HR practice too. For more than a decade, I have been involved in talent acquisition, skill building, corporate training and appraisal processes from technology as well as project management side. Though HR has always been an intriguing art for many, the science of it has been a forerunner in captivating my interest. Earlier when enterprises found their HR databases getting inundated with data, making it next to impossible to derive valuable insights necessary for business decisions, enterprises resorted to analytics.

Approaching the end of current fiscal year, I take a serene glance at the memorable moments and guess what? I am quick to realize there was hardly any conference, webinar, debate, event or discussion in which there was no mention about Artificial Intelligence and its subset technologies, specifically Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning and Neural Networks. In fact, the latest 3-days conference I attended was titled'When Human Becomes Digital' and was centred around artificial intelligence. Analysts, as well as technologists, believe AI has and will continue to reign the world of technology for at least the next 2-3 years. The Ripple Effect created by these emerging technologies will gradually perish.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is proving its powers to prevent and detect everything gripping them from routine employee theft, frauds, insider trading and business risks. Many large corporations, business enterprises have been employing AI to detect and prevent money laundering and widespread frauds. Machine learning has been increasingly deployed by social media platforms to block illicit content such as child pornography and fake news. Businesses have been using AI for higher risk management and responsive fraud detection towards prevention and prediction of crimes. The earlier monitoring systems used by the industries need manual interference and are often not cent percent accurate.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistants has witnessed a massive revolution. What started off as a tech trend has slowly become an indispensable asset to a business enterprise, supporting sales, service and other business functions across multiple industries. We have virtual sales assistants taking in humanistic conversations to customers making sales and generating leads. Powered by AI, these virtual sales assistants enable business enterprises to generate leads than ever before and provide a polite and persistent lead follow-up which often generates to increased sales figures. Virtual sales assistants are a win-win for both the business and the customers as these virtual assistants never get tired or sick or take a day off, leaving salespeople free to do more valuable activities, and customers love them because they are resourceful and provide assistance customised to a customer's requirements.

Data science platforms are the must-have tools for any business enterprises that aspire to scale up its frontiers. Data science platform is essentially a software hub around which all the data science functionalities like data exploration and integration from various sources, coding, model building are performed. Data science platforms are programmed to train and test models and deploy the results to solve real-life business problems. Data science platforms are a massive hit driving business revenues to new heights, this can be ascertained by the fact that the global data science platform market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 39.2% in the next decade to reach to approx. Using the massively varied data science platforms, one question is often asked and debated, which ones are the top data science platforms that let you use the best tools for the job at hand?

The war between security experts charged with the responsibility of protecting information and cyber-criminals who threaten to compromise the integrity of data for different entities has become a cat and mouse game. For instance, as soon as white hats counter one form of malicious behavior using encryption tools, there is the almost immediate development of yet another malevolent form of threat for information systems. The increasing digital connectivity and the automation of virtually all processes in the world of business throughout the whole value chain have led to the creation of agility. This has also led to the development of extremely high levels of threat and significantly raised the risk of cybersecurity. The building of cyber-security into applications is critical in addressing such risks, as well as all the devices that are interconnected from the very beginning.