Pete Hanlon, CTO at Moneypenny
By Pete Hanlon, CTO at Legal Futures Associate Moneypenny
The last two years have provided an important lesson in agility and resilience and have shown just how crucial the right technologies are to business survival, as well as success. One thing’s for sure – the tech that make an impact on a global scale will eventually find its way into the legal sector, so it pays to keep an eye on what’s on the horizon.
Leading outsourced communications company, Moneypenny, handles calls and live chats for more than 1,000 legal firms across the UK. Today, the company employs 1,000 people globally and handles 20 million customer communications each year thanks to the blend of people and technology-based communications solutions.
Here, Moneypenny’s Chief Technology Officer, Pete Hanlon, reveals the technologies with the potential to change the global business landscape in 2022:
1: Computers will better understand us
Over the past few years, technology companies such as Google, Facebook and OpenAI have been releasing increasingly complex natural language models to power Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. These language models are the foundation for much of the improvement we see today allowing computers to extract meaning from written text.
As these models increase in size, they pick up more information about how we structure language, the relationship and meaning of words and the intent of sentences. The result? Computers will be better at understanding us.
2: AI will become explainable
As AI systems and Deep Learning models become ever more complex, it becomes increasingly challenging to explain how systems make predictions. In order to trust the AI systems that drive our cars and help run our lives, we need to understand the processes they use to make a prediction. This is a big area of research for all of the large tech companies and many research groups, and one that will improve significantly over the next twelve months.
3: Mass adoption of no-code / low-code platforms
There are platforms available that allow people with no formal programming background to write computer programs.
If you can work with an Excel spreadsheet, there’s a good chance you can develop complex solutions using these new tools. We are starting to see the mass adoption of this technology as it continues to rise in popularity, effectively democratising the ability to automate business processes.
4: Securing the supply chain
Most companies have been doubling down over the past few years to improve security and reduce the thread of cyber-attack but an area that has been largely forgotten is securing the supply chain. Every piece of software we install within a business has the potential to become a cyber threat and ensuring trust in the supply chain will be a huge area of focus in 2022.
5: Quantum computing research will continue to break new ground
Quantum computing is an exciting field within technology at the moment. These computers are capable of solving certain classes of problems significantly faster than conventional computers and the potential for this technology is vast. The field of quantum computing is a hot topic and will be a game-changing technology that will start to creep into our lives over the next few years.
6: Outsourcing will increase
The pandemic has taught us to focus on what we do best and bring in experts when we need specific solutions. Businesses that adopt this model can grow, innovate and pivot faster which makes them more competitive in the constantly changing and evolving business environment we all operate in. Business Process Outsourcing is a trend that will definitely continue to grow.
