This week on TalkingBizNews.com, Deputy Editor Erica Thompson reached out to Qwoted’s community of experts to ask them what trends have generated the most discussion and what is expected to gain momentum in 2022?

Check out some of the top commentary:

Dinesh Nirmal, General Manager, IBM Automation at IBM

AI-powered automation will be a major trend moving into 2022. Automation has offered a critical lifeline to businesses over the last two years – alleviating the strain from workforce dislocation, supply chain challenges, IT incidents across the enterprise, and customer service disruptions.  Automation has also helped people work more efficiently and effectively, enabling them to focus their time on higher-value work.

In fact, according to IBM’s recent IBV study, surveyed thousands of CIOs who emphasized the importance of data and automation to break down silos and create new value streams. In fact, the number of CIOs who reported high maturity in AI-enabled workflows increased 560% compared to two years ago. However, as we move into 2022, the largest barrier to entry continues to be a crippling, industry-wide shortage of skillsets. Earlier this year, IBM surveyed IT professionals around the world and found the #1 hindrance to successful AI adoption was limited AI expertise or knowledge.

It’s important to note that the highest value of work can be achieved only by a collaboration between these technologies and people. As automation adoption increases, many more human tasks are automated in today’s digital world, but there is still a large portion of our daily work that requires manual labor, even if these tasks are repetitive, they still may require human cognition and intuition to achieve optimal results.

Harley Lippman, CEO at Genesis10

Business Tech Trends: Many of these business trends haven’t changed over the past few years, but the pandemic and the shortage of workers has only increased the opportunities of return on investment in these areas by businesses.

AI and Automation have both been the hottest trend in IT for the past handful of years. The current shortage of workers has only increased the investment and urgency around finding more business and technology opportunities that AI and Automation can help streamline.

CyberSecurity – There has been increased frequency and greater creativity around ransomware. There has also been a huge shift to work-remote. These two factors continue to create investment and advancements around cybersecurity.

Blockchain – 2022 will show continued growth and occasional enterprise-adoption of blockchain across supply chain and the financial services industry. The rise of blockchain will create greater opportunities for possibilities around a more decentralized Web 3.0 (but this will be a trend for future years; not realized anytime in 2022.)

Consumer Tech Trends:

Metaverse – The Metaverse has already been in existence for many years, but the opportunity for expanded uses and incredible investment and growth in this space is prevalent, most recently marked by Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision. The realization of expanded and productive use of the metaverse is still a few years out, but there will be an incredible investment in this space in 2022 and beyond as companies start a race to be a cornerstone in this space.

Autonomous Driving – Though we don’t expect too many people will hop in an autonomous vehicle in 2022, we expect to continue to see progress in this industry as many of our clients are testing fully-autonomous vehicles today. Real-world applications are already starting to be realized, such as in the agricultural industry.

3D Printing – We expect to see accelerated growth in 3D Printing with real-world applications being realized in aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, and the medical industries. The pandemic created additional demand and investment in this field.

5G / Ambient Computing – The introduction of 5G will create more reliable and greater network availability everywhere (home, car, street, etc.) which will drive additional creativity in consumer products to take advantage of this advancement

Ziv Kedem, Head of Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

Disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) will become a key necessity for many organizations and its adoption will skyrocket. The rise in volume and severity of ransomware attacks and growing threats due to climate change, combined with the financial impact of downtime are driving organizations to take disaster recovery seriously.

Most organizations are looking to offload capital expenditures and only pay for what they use. DRaaS, managed or unmanaged, allows companies to eliminate the costs and administrative overhead of managing and maintaining their own purchased secondary sites. Why refresh hardware every couple of years? Why allocate time, resources, and labor to something that doesn’t drive revenue? DRaaS brings organizations a rapid, efficient way to reduce costs and only pay for the applications that need protection.

Apart from capital investments, many organizations do not have the time and administrative overhead required to stand up a secondary data center. DRaaS brings the fastest approach to protect critical workloads.”

Ahon Sarkar, Leader of Banking as a Service at Q2 Holdings

More and more companies will seek to partner with banks and other fintech to provide ‘embedded’ banking services.  Travel and retail companies will partner with banks to provide checking accounts for loyalty program customers to deposit their rewards into directly. A wide range of industries, from rental agencies to auto repair shops, will partner with banks to provide checking accounts to customers to be used for Buy Now Pay Later programs.

The underserved will get more access to banking. Only 47% of Gen Zers have an account with a traditional bank, credit union, neobank or technology company, according to our new research. 

Nearly 45% of Gen Zers surveyed trusted national banks with managing their secure financial data versus only 27% of Baby Boomers.

More than 80% of Gen Z and Millennials are using a money transfer app.

53% of Gen Z respondents and 42% of Millennials wanted to be able to find answers to their banking questions online, while 27% of baby boomers preferred this channel.

Check out the original blog on TalkingBizNews.