Focus on the combinatorial trends
Lareina Yee
Senior Partner, Bay Area
In 2022, we identified 14 technology trends that have the potential to change how we work and live. These range from space technologies, cleantech, and AI to immersive-reality technologies. Each one can deliver a powerful impact on its own—just think about how much better AI-enabled customer care experiences could be. But an even bigger unlock for companies comes when they put innovations from multiple trends to work at the same time to create new capabilities.
For executives in 2023, the challenge will be not just betting on individual trends or ramping up software engineering talent but thinking about how all these technologies can create new possibilities when they’re used together—what we call combinatorial trends.
In many domains, from consumer to enterprise, across all sectors, the combinatorial trends are creating exciting new possibilities. Because of the vast array of possible combinations, creativity in “mixing the ingredients” becomes a key to success. Consider the technologies in a new electric car: cloud and edge computing that power the networks connecting cars; applied AI and machine learning (ML) that enable autonomous decision making and driving logic; clean energy and sustainable consumption technologies that create the core of vehicle electrification through, among others, new lightweight composites and battery capability advancements; next-generation software technologies that enable faster development of customer-facing features and reduce time to market; and trust architectures that ensure secure data sharing. Together, these technologies combine autonomy, connectivity, intelligence, and electrification to enable a new future of terrestrial mobility.
Similarly, new patient-level treatments such as blood-type-based treatments or cell targeting are powered by advances in bioengineering (such as novel therapies based on tissue engineering), immersive-reality technologies (such as remote therapies), Web3 (which can offer traceability, interoperability, and permanence of electronic health records), applied AI and ML (such as improved image processing and predictive health alerts), and cloud and edge computing (which offer increased data access and processing capabilities). The impact is not simply additive—it’s multiplicative.