The new face of big data: AI, IoT and blockchain

Augmented reality, virtual reality

AR and VR are the most futuristic technologies to impact the big data landscape and will likely become fully realized in the next decade. Their relationship to big data’s future involves external customer-facing applications generating big data and internal applications for data discovery. Augmented reality capabilities (in which users deploy mobile devices to perceive enhanced facts and descriptions of data) are associated with the former; the latter involves virtual reality techniques immersing users in computerized graphics of data.

Gartner predicts that by the next decade, 100 million consumers will shop with AR. AR applications incorporate AI functionality via voice capabilities and coincide with the IoT in their predominantly mobile deployment. They have the potential to provide a rich source of unstructured customer-facing data for analytics. VR technologies are useful for users to actually walk through data while determining relationships and valuable characteristics—providing an enriched data discovery experience that supports the decision-making process in an assortment of use cases.

“The preliminary work for VR is already there,” says Harry Blount, Discern chairman, CEO and director of foresight, “being able to look at data at a point in time, look at it over time, interact with data dynamically and kind of being able to self-discover.”

The new face of big data

Big data technologies are no longer novel. They are widely used across verticals as the most effective means of extracting value from data-driven processes. What’s new is the form big data deployments are taking and the technologies that are shaping them. The correlation between AI and big data suggests the surging importance of machine-to-machine intelligence and interaction—which suffices as a suitable definition of the IoT in most cases. Blockchain technologies can empower big data security while accelerating the speed at which transactional data is implemented. VR and AR show the potential to transform the very face of big data, reconfiguring the shapes and forms in which people interact with post-millennial products and services for a truly immersive experience. If they don’t leverage these new methods, their competitors will.

“The world is changing quickly and it’s accelerating,” says Robert Coyne, CMO and VP of professional services for TopQuadrant. “It’s not just that people have to move in a very stepwise fashion these days. Some of them need to make a more paradigm shift because modern enterprises have to be pretty dynamic to stay competitive.”