Digital Innovation Digital Publishing
2 mins read

Trends industry leaders are thinking about for the future

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Artificial Intelligence, voice, AR/VR, events, and international expansion – these are some of the things that have industry leaders thinking as they contemplate the future and growth for their businesses.

In the lead up to the FIPP World Congress, here is a selection of leaders sharing their views on future trends, emerging tech and growth areas for their specific businesses. Hear more from them at the Congress, 9-11 October, in London. 

Josh Macht, Group Publisher for the Harvard Business Review Group

There is a range of trends that I’ll try to organise for the Congress, but let’s just cover a couple. One is artificial intelligence and augmented reality/virtual reality. I am interested in robotics and how that manifests itself with things like self-driving cars. These are trends that I think media and education need to be anticipating, because they’re happening already.

Can we start to think about the HBR archives in ways that we can use machines to get smart, for example? How can those archives, powered by machines, really serve a CEO? That’s where all of a sudden trends come together.

Are there virtual worlds where we can bring people together? For instance, we do something called the HBR ‘How I did it’ feature, which is part of the magazine. So can we have the CEO talk with an editor using VR? Imagine if that CEO is talking about his or her business and we can bring the audience into their business, to show them the shop floor, to talk about an issue the audience is really dealing with.

These are trends that are happening right now and it’s incumbent upon the media company and HBR to find really lean and low-cost ways to learn as much as possible about where our future customer is heading.

James Wildman, UK CEO at Hearst

I think some of the emerging disruptive technologies such as voice-activated products – like Amazon’s Alexa – are creating a range of exciting opportunities for media companies like Hearst.

In the US, Alexa users can hear daily snippets of wisdom from Oprah Winfrey, which is a brilliant innovation.

I’m also very interested in what our clients are saying to us about their concerns about the ‘flight to quality’ as they seek to improve online brand safety.

Read more…