At the end of January, Brands2Life hosted its annual Tech Trends event, inviting journalists from some of the UK’s most influential publications – including the Financial Times, Guardian, Business Insider and Metro – to share their predictions for the year ahead.

Several of our Brands2Life Global partners also joined from around the world, sparking a discussion about which of the trends resonated globally and locally. Read on to hear about specific trends in Germany, Russia, Spain and the US.

A new, digital standard for customer experience – Adel & Link, Germany

In Germany, the pandemic has served as a catalyst for what has been, to date, rather sluggish digital transformation. The effects of these changes will remain even after the crisis has passed. Indeed, companies are going to continue to offer remote work, which will have an impact on people’s residential choices and could strengthen the suburbs (Progressive Provinces) – particularly in the context of long-term rental price development in the metropolitan areas. Likewise, digital tools that make remote work more efficient will become increasingly important. Customer experience platforms based on first-party data and automated decision-making, with a focus on AI-enabled customer insights, will see increasing demand as the path now being taken will not bypass brick-and-mortar retail.

Cybersecurity will bring together the digital fabric of the enterprise – Canela Public Relations, Spain & Portugal

If there is one thing that 2020 achieved, it was forcing the digitisation of Spanish companies. These have had to adapt overnight to having all their employees connected from home, cancelling trips and moving meetings to Zoom. However, this is having a major impact on enterprise security.

Working from home makes employees and their every device connected to their home WiFi the weakest link in the chain. Cybercriminals have developed social engineering techniques to gain user trust and gain access to their private data and, by association, to corporate networks. But this issue goes beyond individual enterprise security managers and, to combat this threat, we need to reinforce existing communication infrastructures to face the new challenges, both of an expanded threat landscape and those posed by the arrival of 5G and the huge expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT).

In short, cybersecurity will be the mega-trend that will mark the technology development of 2021.

The line between technology and politics becomes increasingly blurred – Brands2Life US, USA

The start of 2021 proved to be a very chaotic one for the United States. The riot at the nation’s Capitol happened as January had just barely begun, driving Twitter to ban Donald Trump from its platform permanently and giving increased visibility to alternative social media apps such as Parler. It was virtually impossible to escape the overheated political atmosphere permeating the country, and the line between politics and technology has become increasingly blurred. We’ve seen that technology companies can no longer afford to sit on the sidelines and be apolitical, or they risk getting called out by customers, partners and employees. In addition, many government officials are calling for a breakup of big tech companies, such as Google and Apple, under anti-monopoly laws. This fight is ongoing and could have huge implications from a regulatory standpoint for the technology industry more broadly. We’ll continue to see the intertwining of politics and technology in the US throughout 2021.

Dig deeper still…

 If you’re interested in digging deeper into the big trends to watch this year, don’t miss the recording of Brands2Life’s Tech Trends webinar to hear from leading journalists on what their predictions are for the year. And get in touch if you’d like more information on telling a powerful and consistent story across multiple markets.