8 Business Tech Trends for 2021

2021 is here. Whilst in the UK we are in the throes of another lockdown, there are plenty of reasons to look forward to the year ahead.

2020 was a year like no other and inevitably the trends for 2021 will include plenty that are a result of our need to adapt to our new reality.

I’m going to focus on the trends that will affect office life and business, although these are likely to also impact education and home life too.

Here are my eight tech trends for business in 2021.

1️⃣ Voice in B2B Systems

It seems like this has been coming for a while (like all good trends) but the rise of voice as an input method for B2B systems will be a big this year.

Partly as a result of more homeworking and fewer open-plan offices, partly as a result of improved voice recognition and partly due to the boom in investment in the relatively staid world of B2B software. The time to start talking to your office systems will finally arrive.

At home, we are used to asking Alexa to turn on the lights or tell us the weather. In the office, voice will be used for asking your system to update CRM after you’ve completed a sales call or to schedule a Zoom with your boss.

2️⃣ Online Learning for Business

The explosion in online learning software for homeschooling will spill over into the business world. It used to be that any sort of e-learning in the office was a dull and frustrating affair.

Those days are coming to an end, we are seeing brilliant and engaging business training online now and expect 2021 to be the year that it gets more specific and tailored to your business (partly due to trend number 7 — Machine Learning).

3️⃣ Collaboration and Productivity Software

It’s difficult to keep up with all of the new office tools that are being launched (I guess the sale of Slack for $27bn shows there’s a lot of money to be made).

There’s a whole other blog post that I’m writing on the different new tools that I’m using in my home office. But safe to say that the likes of Notion, Tandem, Slab, Figma and Bluescape are just the tip of the iceberg.

Clean, intuitive, collaborative and low cost, the future of enterprise software is bright.

4️⃣ Online Event Tools

We’re moving to more events online. I daydream about flying around the world for conferences and, I guess, one day they will return in some guise but fundamentally the world has changed and online events are here to stay.

That’s one of the reasons that businesses like Hopin can grow to unicorn status in under a year. Anyone who can crack how to successfully and elegantly bring together hundreds of people online will win big in 2021.

5️⃣ Video Conferencing Laptops

Microphones, Speakers and particularly Webcams were all underlooked parts of a laptop specification before the pandemic. Not anymore!

We are seeing accessories hitting the market to improve on all these parts of underperforming laptops but expect 2021 to be a year when laptop manufacturers start to upgrade and tune their hardware to meet the new demands.

6️⃣ No Code

All of a sudden people have access to tools that allow them to build software and businesses without any coding skills. Sites such as nocode.tech are awash with links and tips for getting that piece of software up and running without needing to hire a developer.

Combine this with relatively simple AI and we are very close to just describing what we want and seeing a computer build it for us.

7️⃣ Machine Learning Everywhere

Machine Learning is already here and guiding us through our daily lives. Whether it’s the algorithms that decide what we see on our phones to the machine learning that shapes what tests we should take in our online learning.

In 2021, we are going to see more of it. Or actually, ‘not see’ more of it as it is increasingly invisible to us. It will just be that the software that you use will know what you want before you ask for it. Making everything that little bit more intuitive.

8️⃣ The Year of Crypto?

With Bitcoin at an all-time high at the time of writing, could this signal the year when we are going to see crypto-currencies and blockchain technologies enter the mainstream?

I’m particularly interested to see how they develop in the areas of payments, privacy and online identity this year. Areas that are crying out for some crypto innovation.

So that’s it, those are my 8.

What did I miss? What are you looking forward to. Let me know, either in the comments or connect with me on LinkedIn.