15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Emerging Technology

“The next decade will be even more disruptive for how customers interact with brands,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at last month’s Summit EMEA. Here are the numbers to back it up.

Emerging technology trends signal a future with screenless interactions between businesses and consumers, with voice, augmented and virtual reality, wearable devices, and artificial intelligence slowly but surely removing the traditional graphic user interface (GUI) from the equation.

“The next decade will be even more disruptive for how customers interact with brands,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at the 2017 Summit EMEA. Here are the numbers to back it up.

1. Gartner predicts that 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality by 2020. It also predicts that 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human by that time.
2. A PwC study of 2,500 U.S. consumers and business decision makers found that business leaders, specifically, believe AI is going to be fundamental in the future. In fact, 72% termed it a “business advantage.”
3. PwC also found that in the immediate future, execs are looking for AI to alleviate repetitive, menial tasks, such as paperwork (82%), scheduling (79%), and timesheets (78%).
4. PwC asked which AI-powered solutions digital executives imagine having the largest impact on their business. The majority, 31%, said virtual personal assistants. Automated data analysts (29%), automated communications like emails and chatbots (28%), automated research reports and information aggregation (26%), and automated operational and efficiency analysts (26%) rounded out the top five.

5. In May 2016, Google reported that 20% of its mobile queries were voice searches.
6. 500 million VR headsets will be sold by 2025. That could be good news for first movers such as Facebook and Samsung with their respective Oculus Rift and Gear VR offerings.
7. 37% of consumers use Siri, 23% use Microsoft’s Cortana AI, and 19% use Amazon’s Alexa AI at least monthly.
8. Niantic’s Pokemon Go, which greatly boosted mainstream awareness of AR apps, hit a peak of 45 million daily active users last July.
9. Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa could bring the U.S. e-commerce giant $10 billion of revenues by 2020 and be a “mega-hit.”
10. Marketers’ lack of understanding of AI-driven marketing might be influencing the rate of its adoption. To wit, more than 40% of participants said they thought they had already adopted AI-driven marketing, reflecting a belief that their targeting capabilities and automation meant that AI was operating behind the scenes.
11. According to research by Adobe Digital Insights (ADI), the impact of automation and robots are top-of-mind, but contrary to popular belief, most people are talking about how robots are helping them do their work, rather than taking away jobs. Automation mentions online have doubled year-over-year (YoY), and average daily mentions of robots and jobs have increased 70% YoY.
12. Predictive analytics software will be a big early-growth category for machine-learning applications. It’s expected to reach $6.5 billion worldwide in 2019, up from $2 billion in 2012.
13. In 2008, there were already more “things” connected to the Internet than people. By 2020, the amount of Internet-connected things will reach 50 billion, with $19 trillion in profits and cost savings coming from IoT over the next decade.
14. By 2020, it’s estimated that 90% of cars will be connected to the Internet as compared to 10% in 2012.
15. $127 billion: That’s how much the drone industry could be worth by 2020, according to recent reports by PwC. It also reported that some of the greatest increases could be in business, farming, and special effects applications.