Generative AI will change the nature of how we interact with all software, and given how many brands have significant software components in how they interact with customers, generative AI will drive and distinguish how more brands compete. In our last HBR piece, "Customer Experience in the Age of AI," we discussed how the use of one's customer information is already differentiating branded experiences. Now with generative AI, personalization will go even further, tailoring all aspects of digital interaction to how the customer wants it to flow, not how product designers envision cramming in more menus and features. And then as the software follows the customer, it will go to places that range beyond the tight boundaries of a brand's product. It will need to offer solutions to things the customer wants to do.

Racial stereotypes were upended during a recent study that involved artificial intelligence. New research from the University of Georgia found that Black bots were considered more competent and more human than white or Asian bots used in the same study. This contrasts with past research on human-to-human interactions. "We found that in the digital space, because Black AI is so unusual, stereotypes amplified in the opposite direction," said researcher Nicole Davis, a third-year doctoral student in UGA's Terry College of Business. "The Black bots were not just seen as competent, but really competent – more competent than the white or Asian bots."

In Asia, the wealth of affluent and mass-affluent customer segments is growing rapidly, bringing about new opportunities and growth prospects for banks and wealth managers alike in the region. But to tap into this opportunity, services providers will need to embrace technology and digital platforms to not only provide customers the services they expect, but also gain in productivity and efficiency, a new report by global consultancy McKinsey says. The report, titled Digital and AI-enabled wealth management: the big potential in Asia and released on February 02, looks at the region's fast growing household wealth and shares how wealth managers can capture this opportunity by embracing data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce costs, increase access for their clients and improve customer experience across the entire lifecycle. In 2021, the wealth pool of households with investable assets of US$100,000 to US$1 million in Asia totaled US$2.7 trillion. That sum is projected to soar to US$4.7 trillion by 2026 as incomes continue to rise across the region, the report says.

Making predictions for the year ahead is an age-old tradition, but some are easier than others. For instance, saying 2022 will see a new Marvel movie is a pretty safe bet. Looking into a crystal ball and predicting technology movements is a lot harder -- especially with factors like Covid, climate change and ongoing supply chain disruption adding so much chaos to the mix. There is also the risk that overblown promises for one technology or another can wear out readers, making them much less trusting of future predictions. With all of this in mind, here are my predictions for technology in 2022 -- not based on any clairvoyance, but on my understanding of technology, industry and society.

As the world battled the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a greater emphasis on the use of technology and artificial intelligence to improve the performance of companies across various sectors. "India has played a significant role in developing some innovative solutions during the pandemic. It has the potential to become a hub for Artificial Intelligence-based solutions," said Romal Shetty, President, Consulting at Deloitte India. A survey by Deloitte of over 2,700 executives found that AI has provided organisations with a competitive advantage and most organisations are aiming to harness its power on a broader level and increase investments across AI implementations. A Deloitte-CII report titled- 'The Age of With: Humans & Machines' highlights, "Machines are transforming the way we do business and almost every component of our daily lives. It is not about people versus machines, it is about augmenting humans with machines to reach even greater heights, combining the intelligence and power of machines with the creativity of humans. The intelligence is artificial from machines, but the implications are very real."

Our world is increasingly powered by artificial intelligence. By the end of the next decade, AI will have generated $15.7 trillion in economic growth and touched virtually every area of our lives. But while AI is an incredibly powerful problem-solving tool, we're still a long way from the talkative, genuinely intelligent AI personalities that many of us grew up dreaming about. The truth is that while machine learning enables computers to spot patterns and carry out complex tasks, human-like intelligence (or even just the ability to convincingly fake it) remains elusive. Sure, some hotels now have robot butlers who'll help with your luggage -- but they're lousy conversationalists, and wouldn't have a prayer of passing the Turing test. To find AI systems that are genuinely capable of talking to humans, you need to look to more specialized tools designed for precisely that purpose.

In many areas of life, your customers or prospects are already using chatbots in a growing number of capacities. This makes them a better candidate to act as the voice of your brand or company, and can help automate many of the processes that suck up marketers' valuable time. You don't need to be a marketing expert to see the huge rise in the use of bots during the COVID crisis, and how those applications can transfer to boost your marketing efforts. And that's ignoring the general rise of bots, estimated to grow in market size from $2.6 billion in 2019 to $9.4 billion by 2024, a 29.7% CAGR. As a marketer, the rise of digital efforts has paralleled the rise of chatbots, and as those bots get smarter and the public becomes more aware of them, their use in content marketing, social media and even as responders to email campaigns can all deliver metric-heavy value.

The digital revolution has been increasingly enhancing the impact of marketing on management. Digital marketing is quite a broad term encompassing social media marketing, e-mail marketing, internet marketing, and search engine marketing, among others. While e-mails, social media, websites, and e-commerce, are tools that marketers use to promote services and products to their target audience, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now intrinsically being used for digital marketing to map the right kind of promotional tools for specific market offerings. AI and Customer Value A combination of AI and digital marketing has been adopted extensively across sectors such as healthcare, financial services, retail, automobiles, education, and entertainment. As a case in point, the ability to track data makes it possible for retailers to develop strategies for a better understanding of consumer behaviour by keeping the user's purchase life-cycle at the center.

Tech service provider NTT released a report on Monday outlining the top digital disruption predictions for 2020. In the report, NTT CTO Ettienne Reinecke highlighted five specific disruptive technologies expected to impact 2020. After gathering global insights on intelligent tech solutions from clients, NTT experts determined the future's most impactful disruptive technologies. Gartner's IT glossary defines digital disruption as "an effect that changes the fundamental expectations and behaviors in a culture, market, industry or process that is caused by, or expressed through, digital capabilities, channels or assets." SEE: Digital transformation: An IT pro's guide (free PDF) (TechRepublic) While the word disruption may have a negative connotation, digital disruption is a positive movement for the tech world.

If you are a person enjoying certain familiarity with the terms tech world, you must have come across terms such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data. Each of these terms carry an indomitable weight and significance to the world of business and technology. Every moment the million bytes of digital data produced contribute to the staggering growth of digital data which can be utilised for drawing effective and useful analytical insights to help business processes and add value to different endeavours in life. Grossly, this is termed as Big Data. The machines and machine intelligence are getting smarter to understand human needs and contexts.