Edward D. Hess, Professor of Business Administration & Batten Executive-in-Residence – Darden School of Business, and co-author of Humility Is the New Smart Technology will continue to advance much faster than the business world will adopt and much faster than the social and governmental sectors will adapt. The two big areas that will practically lead the way in 2018 are The Industrial Internet of Things and Global Politics. Global industrial Incumbents who are ahead now in technology adoption and who are building AI-Cloud based platforms to serve an ecosystem will continue to advance and ultimately that will lead to massive global industry consolidations leading to large reductions in the number of human employees. The power of large AI-based platform organizations will be the story of the future. The impact is still 3-5 years out but, when it hits, it will be big. The dominant Future of Work issues in 2018 will be political. How will China advance toward its goal of becoming the AI global leader and who will contest that? What happens in the mid-term elections in the United States? And will Germany's to be formed new government continue to exhibit the leadership needed in Europe and globally?

We're unofficially past the "Happy New Year" stage of 2017; that new year smell has almost entirely worn off, people are back from their sunny vacations in the Caribbean, and many are hard at work. A lot of enterprise tech trends have been predicted to establish themselves this year, but none is as buzzy as artificial intelligence. It has been on the horizon for some time, but 2017 is poised to be the first time that bots at work are natural parts of our everyday workflow. Don't be mistaken, AI has a ways to go, and could accelerate at an unpredictable pace as bots gather more data. But people's hesitancy about committing to bots at work, and questions around the effectiveness of these tools, will gradually melt away.