What does 2023 hold for us?

2020-22 has been a roller coaster ride for technology. But 2023 so far appears to be a time to settle down. The pandemic (hopefully) is behind us, and a lot of tech adoption has already taken place.

One thing we are ready for now is: Hybrid Everything. Whether it’s work, entertainment, shopping or what have you, you can do it all from the office, home or any remote place. The technology is in place. The infrastructure is in place. The cloud is in place. Mainly, the attitude is in place. It has become such that even moonlighting is being allowed by IT services companies.

Another big thing that could happen, if the rollout if fast enough, is 5G. 2022 was the beginning, so let’s see how much of the country we can cover this year. 5G is critical for Industry 4.0, smart homes and smart cars. There’s also the added advantage of an all-pervasive broadband network.

One thing that did really well in 2022 and could go further this year is UPI. We already have more than ₹10 lakh crore worth of transactions every month as it has seamlessly connected all the online payment portals. Many countries in the world are looking to adopt this. Overall, Digital India will probably go from strength to strength.

India doesn’t have a global level social media network of its own, though Koo did claim 50 million downloads. Curiously this year it made inroads into Brazil. Twitter saw a roller coaster ride with Elon Musk taking it over. Let’s see what happens to both of them this year.

The Metaverse, cryptocurrencies and NFTs all went bust this year. The hype cycle has gone. Now the people want solid reliable solutions. As far as crypto goes, right now it’s like a stock market. It may have crashed in 2022, but it could rise in 2023. The Metaverse is a great idea and but still is on the cusp. Breakthroughs in Extended Reality will decide how soon all of us can get onto the Metaverse bandwagon.

We were looking at alternate energy boosted by tech. That took a beating this year. The Ukraine crisis put a very heavy energy strain on the West. The EU has declared both natural gas and nuclear as green energy while the coal plants are being fired up. While there have been cold fusion breakthroughs one doesn’t know when the implementation will take place.

Either way there has been techceleration and India has gone in for a tech upgrade from 2020-22. Digitization. Digitalization. Digital transformation. It has all happened. The time has come to take this forward for the coming decade. We should not put our foot off the tech accelerator.