Investing in technology is a way to increase corporate capital, or at least that’s what more than half of the companies in Latin America believe. This is the most important conclusion from a report by the firm TechTarget, which indicates that 53% of companies in Latin America will increase disbursements for their information technology (IT) area. In comparison, 42% will keep it the same.
As for the projects that will attract attention in Latin America by 2022, TechTarget highlights productivity suites, business processes management and automation, privacy compliance standards, governance, and data protection, among others. Productivity suites and process automation are the top regional priorities for technology investments catching up in automation with Western Europe, the US, and Asia.
What will LatAm companies do most in terms of technology investment? TechTarget sums it up in five fields:
- Automation and virtualization of processes to streamline routine tasks, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate time to market. The world will advance to the next level by combining robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), digital twins, and 3D printing in such a way that, by 2022, there will be 600,000 installations of industrial robots worldwide, according to estimates by the international consulting firm McKinsey. And Latin America must not fall behind to position itself as a viable market, but needs to solve first a larger problem: data gathering.
- 5G networks: The fifth-generation wireless network will allow faster connectivity over longer distances, with exponentially faster downloads and almost non-existent latency. The Internet of Things and the 5G network will support the creation of new services and business models linked to smart products enabled by sensors; it will generate new offers to the value chain and offer better experiences to customers.
- Distributed infrastructures: For companies to be able to move computing power further to the perimeter of their networks, they will have to resort to the union of Cloud Computing with Edge Computing, which will allow them to reach devices that handle large amounts of data with much lower latency, in a greater number of remote locations (important in LatAm because of distances) and thus accelerate decision making with advanced analytics.
- Applied artificial intelligence: This megatrend, which refers to the implementation of algorithms to train machines (so that they recognize patterns and interpret and act on them), promises to improve customer satisfaction through new interfaces and interaction methods; It is therefore not surprising that that, by 2024, more than 50% of user interactions will be complemented by AI-powered vision algorithms.
- Trusted architectures: Through a set of technologies and approaches designed for a world of cyberattacks, companies will seek to create architectures that allow verifying the reliability of devices as data flows through networks, APIs, and applications. In turn, they could include distributed ledger technologies (DLT), including blockchain, and “zero-trust security” approaches to prevent data breaches.
