Intelligence as a Service, Developer Experience, Platforms and Python emerge as major trends in Thoughtworks’ latest Technology Radar
The emergence of Alexa, Siri and Cortana, are driving businesses to investigate how to incorporate conversational user interfaces to better serve their customers. This trend has been highlighted in the latest Technology Radar from global technology consultancy, Thoughtworks. This bi-annual report provides an assessment of emerging trends shaping the future of software development and business strategy.
Developed by Thoughtworks’ Technology Advisory Board and designed for technology stakeholders, from developers to CTOs, the 16th edition of the Technology Radar is based upon Thoughtworks’ observations, conversations and frontline experiences of solving its clients’ toughest business challenges. Thoughtworks has 4,000 employees spanning 40 offices in 14 countries and works with Fortune 500 companies across multiple industries including retail, financial services, travel and transport, and technology.
“Today, tech leaders are exploring how conversational UI and natural language processing will impact business strategy. At Thoughtworks, we see the future bringing a wider range of interactions that will integrate gestures, facial expressions, and touch, blurring the line between physical and digital experiences. Utilizing machine-powered processes for simple tasks allows the technologists to focus on new scenarios, complex interactions, and consequences,” said Dr. Rebecca Parsons, Chief Technology Officer of Thoughtworks.
“Evolving interactions mean organizations have new ways to interact with their customers and add new value through ‘intelligence as a service’; the key is to understand what’s commodity and what is truly differentiating for your business,” said Mike Mason, Technical Advisor to the CTO at Thoughtworks. “In order to capitalize on these changes, IT organizations need to differentiate by clearing the obstacles from their path and empowering developers to do exactly what they want to do: game-changing software delivery.”
The notable themes in this edition of Technology Radar include:
Conversational UI and Natural Language Processing
- Conversational UI now covers a spectrum of designs such as intelligent chatbots that understand intent through natural language processing. Currently, 32% of executives say voice recognition is the most-widely used AI technology in their business*. However, we see Multimodal Interaction as the future of conversational UI, with an integrated range of interactions such as gesture, facial expression, and touch.
- Learn more at thght.works/ConUI.
Intelligence as a Service
- A family of platforms burst onto the scene recently, encompassing a wide variety of surprisingly powerful utilities from voice processing, natural language understanding, image recognition, and deep learning. Organizations are already investigating what new horizons they may expose by combining commodity cognition with intelligence about their own businesses.
- Learn more at thgth.works/IntSer.
Developer Experience as the New Differentiator
- User experience design has been a key differentiator for technology product companies for many years. The emergence of new tools, combined with the battle for engineering talent is driving a similar focus on developer experience. Increasingly, organizations evaluate cloud offerings based on the amount of engineering friction they reduce, treat APIs as products, and spin up teams focused on engineering productivity.
- Learn more at thgth.works/DevExp.
Rise of the Platforms
- Today’s platforms use a self-service API, with maturing tools such as Docker, Kubernetes and DCOS, are team-configured and also team-provisioned. A number of notable Silicon Valley companies have recently illustrated how building the correct platform can yield significant benefits, such as Amazon with its AWS infrastructure platforms.
- Learn more at thgth.works/RiseOTP.
Pervasive Python
- Historically, enterprise adoption of Python as a first class language in production has been rare. However, the recent industry trends around AI commoditization and applications, the maturity of Python 3, and architectural approaches such as microservices and containers, have boosted Python in the programming ecosystem.
- We see Python bridging and unifying the pided world of (data) scientists and engineers in organizations, used as the common language for both modeling and research as well as for final production deployment.
- Learn more at thgth.works/PerPyt.
In the last four months, more than 700 companies have used Thoughtworks’ Build Your Own Radar tool to map their own technology landscape to ensure their business and tech strategies are in line with emerging trends and latest industry developments.
Visit Thoughtworks.com/radar to access the interactive version, download the PDF and watch videos discussing the themes in more detail.
Thoughtworks also provides users with access to an open-source visualization tool which enables them to map their technology portfolio and to objectively assess what’s working, and what isn’t.
Source * https://www.narrativescience.com/state-of-ai