While predicting the year ahead should be taken with a handful of salt, some indications of what could be in store for the technology sector in 2023 have emerged. Artificial intelligence (AI) has surfaced as a big player this year, while the hype bubble over the metaverse appears to have burst. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies have nosedived amid scandal and economic pressure and the tech sector has seen job cuts en masse. Euronews Next takes a look at what could lie ahead for the tech and crypto sectors in 2023. AI has made major strides this year, especially with ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI foundation, which is self-censoring and generates text at a user's request.

Artificial intelligence. AI has made major strides this year, especially with ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI …

The upcoming year seems to be the time security and technology professionals think artificial intelligence and machine learning will have mass application for security and detection. But just as the industry embraces the technology's potential, bad actors will look to capitalize on the new capabilities that could be unlocked for deception techniques such as deepfakes and disinformation. The economy and how it might affect security budgets weighed heavily on the minds of those who submitted predictions this year, and technology was no exception as some predict new tech and services will be driven by budget-conscious decisions in mind. We're seeing AI and powerful data capabilities redefine the security models and capabilities for companies. Security practitioners and the industry as a whole will have much better tools and much faster information at their disposal, and they should be able to isolate security risks with much greater precision.

Steven Spielberg's 2002 sci-fi thriller "Minority Report," in which Tom Cruise is the captain of a state-of-the-art "Precrime" law enforcement division, is still a touchstone for new tech: Self-driving cars are (kind of) here, but we're still waiting on flying cars, jetpacks and more innovations like the ones Spielberg's futurist think tank dreamed up. Here are some of the tech predictions the movie, which was based on the 1956 short story by legendary sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, got right and some of the things it failed to foresee about the future.

You might think it foolhardy to make predictions about something that changes as furiously fast as emerging technology. Driven by massive investments, competing for a market that appears limitless, thousands of companies innovate constantly, sometimes at cross purposes. Yet we are human, after all, so we can't resist peering into the unknowable future and proclaiming, "Yes, this is what's ahead." Plus it's that time of year: in January we are (we hope) imbued with a fresh energy that allows us to accurately assess the year ahead. Not that all annual predictions are mere guesses. Clearly, the tech forecasters below are top practitioners who are close to their respective sectors. They're the experts who have long labored in cloud, AI, security, edge, data analytics, digital transformation, accruing years of deep market experience. If anyone can foresee the future, it's these seasoned thought leaders.

We have reached an inflection point. After AWS pioneered cloud technology more than 15 years ago, cloud infrastructure has evolved to a place where we are seeing all parts of the cloud reach practically anywhere on the planet--and even into space. The cloud has allowed what was once science fiction to become science fact. Models and techniques in the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) realm have gotten better and better--so much so that we see glimpses of new kinds of use cases emerging that we previously only imagined in movies and comics. We are entering a phase where data is abundant, access to it is almost instantaneous, and our ability to make sense of it in new and subtle ways is practically automatic.

We have reached an inflection point. After AWS pioneered cloud technology more than 15 years ago, cloud infrastructure has evolved to a place where we are seeing all parts of the cloud reach practically anywhere on the planet--and even into space. The cloud has allowed what was once science fiction to become science fact. Models and techniques in the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) realm have gotten better and better--so much so that we see glimpses of new kinds of use cases emerging that we previously only imagined in movies and comics. We are entering a phase where data is abundant, access to it is almost instantaneous, and our ability to make sense of it in new and subtle ways is practically automatic.

An ongoing health crisis and a global recession: even for the most attuned of analysts, the past months have brought in a load of unexpected events that have made the coming years especially difficult to envision. Yet research firm CCS Insights has taken up the challenge and delivered a set of 100 tech predictions for the years 2021 and beyond. The exercise is an annual one for the company, which last year anticipated, among many other things, that the next decade could see the rise of deep fake detection technology, or the adoption of domestic robots in some households. One year later, and many of those predictions have been affected in one way or another by the COVID-19 pandemic. "What we've seen in the last few months has completely transformed a lot of the areas we cover," Angela Ashenden, principal analyst at CCS Insights, told ZDNet.

Gartner has unveiled its biggest predictions for IT organisations and users for 2020 and beyond. These predictions analyse how technology is changing society and the expectations of users. "Technology is changing the notion of what it means to be human," said Daryl Plummer, VP and Fellow at Gartner. "CIOs in end-user organizations must understand the effects of the change and reset expectations for what technology means." "This year's predictions help us move beyond thinking about mere notions of technology adoption and draw us more deeply into issues surrounding what it means to be human in the digital world," said Plummer.

IDC released today its worldwide IT industry predictions for 2020 in a webcast with Frank Gens, IDC's senior vice president and chief analyst. The focus for the 10 predictions for next year and beyond is the rise of the digital economy. By 2023, IDC predicts, over half (52%) of global GDP will be accounted for by digitally transformed enterprises. To drive digital supremacy, an enterprise must devote half of its budget to supporting digital innovation, establishing a large-scale, high-performing, digital innovation factories and a third-party ecosystem to produce digital products and provide fee-based wholesale digital services to other enterprise. The latter will be an entire new enterprise competency, similar to the management of Amazon's platform for third-party sellers.