The Asia-Pacific region begins to face inflationary pressures and the threat of recession in 2022 for major economies in North America and Europe. But in 2023, the long shadow of uncertainty continues to stretch, laying the groundwork for the future for technology leaders to make smart investments to enhance their resilience and ensure future growth.
Here are some of Forrester’s most important predictions for Asia Pacific technology in 2023:
- The adoption rate of digital industry platforms in the region will increase by 30%. Manufacturing, construction, utilities and other industrial companies in Asia Pacific, which account for 45% of global industrial value added, will lead industry cloud adoption through digital industrial platforms (DIPs) that enable companies to connect and analyze industrial data (bridging operational technologies). [OT] and information technology [IT]) and provide ongoing customer value. With government encouragement and the need for corporate resilience and technological self-reliance, we expect companies in China, Japan, South Korea and Australia to accelerate their local DIP adoption in 2023.
- Investments in the Industrial Virtual World initiative will be doubled. In 2022, BMW opened the world’s first digital design and manufacturing plant in China, and Hyundai announced a partnership with Unity Technologies. None of these are fully realized Metaverse, but manufacturing is leading the way beyond today’s Metaverse predecessors to a more integrated environment. Manufacturers should carefully study existing industrial virtual world plans and decide how to deliver real employee or customer value.
- 10% of automation budgets will go to elasticity, and process intelligence will revive 20% of failed RPA programs. Uncertainty will push tech executives into a defensive position, addressing known issues and risks, and moving from transformation to resilience — a more rational approach. In particular, 40% of APAC companies that have adopted Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are still beginners and are struggling to find high-value processes to automate. They will need process intelligence solutions to revive stagnant or flattened RPA initiatives.
- Among related companies, 35% combine physical robots with mainstream technologies. Japan’s population is the oldest in the world; Singapore, South Korea and China are also facing declining populations. Labor shortages are forcing organizations to seek robotic workers to keep them resilient. Industries such as food and beverage, cleaning services, commercial and home delivery, healthcare and manufacturing will all benefit from autonomous mobile robots, collaborative robots, robotic security and drone inspections.
- The number of cybersecurity startups headquartered in Asia Pacific will increase by 10%. Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, only 61 of the 1,547 startups in the world were from the Asia-Pacific region. We expect the number of cybersecurity startups in Asia Pacific to increase in 2023 as organisations in Australia, Singapore and India invest in, support and support cybersecurity startups and governments increase their investment in cybersecurity in the region. CISOs in the region should develop startup reconnaissance capabilities and support local innovation scenarios.
- A cloud-native-first strategy and cloud financial operations will take center stage. Companies in Asia Pacific will continue to prioritize container-based, microservices-oriented architectures with distributed capabilities, which can enable a range of technology areas such as AI/ML, data management, IoT, 5G, edge computing, and blockchain benefit. While many users rely entirely on cloud-native tools for free access and light optimization, they need to choose third-party cloud cost management and optimization tools to deal with the looming threat of inflation and recession.
- One in four tech executives will report on AI governance to their board of directors. 80% of Asia Pacific data and analytics decision makers are building AI technologies, ahead of their global peers (73%). Given the widespread adoption of AI, regulation and the need for trust, a quarter of CIOs and CTOs will be driven to lead AI governance, which will join cybersecurity and compliance as board-level topics. The right technology executives of the future should embrace their new AI governance roles and use this opportunity to implement an ethical technology strategy across the organization.
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This article was written by Principal Analyst Danny Mu and originally appeared on Gentlemen.