5 business tech trends to watch

Did you know you can get paid to suggest things to chatbots like ChatGPT? It’s true — it’s called prompt engineering, and it’s quickly becoming, for some experts anyway, a lucrative career.

According to Business Insider, prompt engineers work to improve results and rigor from artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. They essentially manipulate the language model a chatbot runs on to produce better responses.

They also sometimes train a company’s workforce on how to optimize their usage of a given AI tool.

As for the lucrative part, the north-of-$300,000 salary cited in some articles is admittedly rare and usually reserved for expert “AI whisperers” with PhDs.

Still, I was curious about ChatGPT and gave it a try. In my anecdotal experience, the quality of the content directly correlates to the quality of the prompts. The more specific and well-defined your input is, the better output you will receive.

I can see ChatGPT and other generative AI being used frequently for foundational research, but human understanding and nuance are still required to connect the dots from basic knowledge to greater understanding. That won’t necessarily always be the case, making this new trend one to watch in terms of identifying ways you might be able to use or develop your skills.

Another tech trend that’s set to take off this year is marketing in the metaverse.

But first, a quick word about the metaverse itself. McKinsey & Company defines the metaverse as “an evolution of today’s internet — it is something we are immersed in instead of something we look at.”

It is based on the physical world we inhabit, but it contains the promise, according to McKinsey & Company, of “vast digital worlds.”

If marketing interests you, or you’re already in the field, think of the metaverse as a parallel opportunity. As the management education company Emeritus explains, re-creating what you’re doing in the real world and building metaverse campaigns based on real-world experiences are two ways to realize material success in the virtual space.  

Why is this trend taking shape? Well, companies look at the metaverse as a way to reach Gen Z and millennials. TechTarget also points out that the metaverse allows companies to control their own digital world. This means they get to craft the user experience rather than have third parties determine how they interact with potential customers. 

As this trend evolves, you’ll also want to watch for new job opportunities. Emeritus cites a few career options: business strategists, community managers, ecosystem managers and even storytellers.

AI presents a double-edged sword in the cybersecurity realm: Security experts and hackers alike can use it.

What’s more, technological advancement comes with a certain amount of risk that must be addressed to protect data and information.

What will this look like?

For starters, companies will need to step up their game when it comes to threats. Take phishing attacks as an example. According to CSO, hackers can use AI to customize emails so that recipients are more likely to engage with them.

Generative AI is also making hackers’ jobs of parting people from their personal information that much easier. CSO notes how hackers can leverage AI to develop realistic collateral — photos, social media profiles and the like — to make their communication seem more legitimate.

How can companies combat this? AI allows for better response times when a threat is detected, according to Engati, a company specializing in customer experience chatbots. Companies can also beat hackers at their own game, since a lot of technology “learns” how to better respond to and prevent attacks.

If you had a way to make some of the simpler, more repetitive tasks at work take less time, would you? (Looking at you, expense reports!)

I imagine many of you would. Well, that’s workflow automation. HubSpot describes workflow automation as “the process of using rule-based logic to launch a series of tasks that run on their own without any human intervention.”

If you’ve used the “SUM” function in Excel to add up a column of numbers, you’ve used a basic version of this.

A more complex example of automating workflows would be email marketing. When you sign up to receive a newsletter for a specific topic, you’ve likely participated in a marketer’s workflow. 

Often, an audience will be segmented based on their interests, which lets one company target multiple audiences with diverse but related content.

It doesn’t end there with email marketing. This technology trend of automating workflows will reshape many industries across the board, and now is the time to learn how to capitalize on it.

If you’ve used a video doorbell, you’ve participated in the Internet of Things (IoT).

Basically, IoT is a fancy way of referring to a virtually connected network of things. It started with our phones and now includes our refrigerators. 

We also have wearable technology, like smartwatches and weight trackers, that monitors key data about our health. All that technology captures data about our lives. From the food we eat to our weight the next morning after eating it, everything we do can now be a piece of digitized information.

The concept is called datafication. It essentially takes your daily life and boils it down to data points that can be leveraged in multiple ways.

Like workflow automation, IoT can make aspects of our lives better. There is a cost, however, for convenience outside of the monetary. That, of course, is our privacy.

As Tech Xplore points out, we’re quickly becoming immune to devices tracking our every movement. So much so that, by age 13 our kids will have 72 million data points about them.

If any of these top trends for 2023 and beyond have piqued your curiosity, you’re not alone. I recommend seeing where it will take you.

Read articles and books about the trends that interest you. Take a course. Apply what you can to your current life or job. Experiment with your newfound knowledge.

Take that first step and execute where others simply gather information. In this way, you can put yourself in a position to use today’s technology for tomorrow’s good.