The world, in both a business and personal setting, continues to be disrupted by digital trends that are driving innovation across industries and sectors. Digital trends continue to create richer, more personal customer relationships, while enhancing operations and processes across the board. These trends are ultimately helping organisations reimagine their capabilities and stave off elimination in the era of disruption. Information Age asked ten experts for their views on what are some of the key current digital trends, and how they will shape future endeavours. Chris Dixon, technical consultant at Axians UK, explains the benefits that 5G will bring in an increasingly connected era.

There is a huge amount of pressure on healthcare services today with much written about the resulting impact on patient care. You only need to reflect on the recent election campaign to see what an emotive issue it remains throughout the UK. What's also true is that advanced technology is taking a bigger role in healthcare than ever before, looking to alleviate some of the burdens on our health systems and provide greater support for our wellbeing. One clear theme underpinning this shift is applications. Whether being used by organisations to adapt and streamline processes to improve data access and patient care or by patients themselves looking at ways to better understand and manage their health, the sector is set to be transformed by the evolution of apps.

And you need some information about the clients you will be meeting for the first time. Power up your tablet and download a spreadsheet that is more spread than sheet. And you start searching and searching and searching for the pertinent information. But what if what you are looking for is not part of the standard ledger? There's no one in the car but you, but you are dying to ask a question.

Click here to learn more about author James Kobielus. As we bid farewell to 2016, the entire data industry is focused on cognitive computing as the path forward. One key assumption in everybody's predictions is that somehow this resource called "cognition"--in other words, the substance of human thought, reasoning, and evidence-driven decision making -- will continue to flow into every pore of the digital world. I don't doubt that it will, but it seems to me that we're all just assuming that it will, without directly examining the the trends that will make it happen. For example, in this recent article, Mike Gualtieri of Forrester Research lists nine "AI technology building blocks" -- Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, etc. -- that rely on cognition.

At the beginning of my tech sales career, I learned quickly that hardware, software, and services could help address and achieve the challenges and goals of my enterprise clients. To get there, I had to do as Tony Sarris, founder of N2Semantics says, "ping, discover, act and learn." I "pinged" databases and experts; I analyzed and "discovered" info and resources along the way; I "acted" on my business savvy and put together the A team -- with whom I would "learn" from and built integration-able solutions for my clients. When I think of Cognitive Apps today, I think of the "ping, discover, act and learn" dance. Well, because, as I see it, it is part of the challenges that cognitive apps need to address to work ( understand, reason and learn).