The next wave of technical innovation will be driven by businesses looking to provide more touchless experiences to their coronavirus-wary customers. If you had asked me a year ago where I thought the tech industry was headed, I probably would have answered that we are headed toward the age of "smart everything." Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) were really in vogue last year. It seemed that nearly every vendor was scrambling to include some sort of machine learning into their products. It reminded me of the way things were several years back when all the tech vendors were rushing to include cloud in their offerings.