What you need to know:

• Three of the most transformational technologies of the last decade are running out of juice.
• Four new technologies are set to replace them as growth drivers.
• AI is the most mature.
• Hardware might finally have caught up with the promise of AR/VR. 
• "Software composability" – yes, read on – has huge implications for CMOs by giving brands more choice and more control 
• Web3 offers longevity for digital assets and decentralisation for the way we manage stakeholder relationships.

Three technologies which fuelled marketing innovation for the last 20 years – software as a service, social media and smart mobility – are reaching the plateau of the famous technology innovation S curve, says Scott Brinker the editor-in-chief of chiefmartec. But don't worry, you ain't seen nothing yet.

The technology innovation S curve, for those wondering, is essentially a steep initial line of innovation-fuelled growth which curves off as the technology matures, and then steepens again as the technology is disrupted and improved, before repeating the cycle. The S is actually diagonal.

Brinker believes that after a brief hiatus while the impact of economic headwinds wash through the broader technology ecosystem, marketing technology is set for even more explosive growth than the last decade delivered.

That's because four new technologies – artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR), software composability and Web3 are about to start their own exponential climb up the innovation curve.

Mi3 spoke with Brinker to unpack and understand the implications for brands.

AI

Of the four trends Brinker expects to ascend the innovation S curve in the coming years, artificial intelligence (AI) is the most developed and mature, even if it is still quite early on its commercialisation journey

AI generally refers to the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that we always traditionally assumed would require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation.

Think of AI as creating a "smart" machine that can learn and make decisions like a human. For example, a recommendation system on a website might use AI algorithms to learn about customer preferences and suggest products the customer might like based on their previous purchases. The goal of AI is to create systems that can interact and work with humans in a more natural and intelligent way. (These example of AI were both created using the ChatGPT AI tool. The giveaway is that it insists on calling people, 'humans'.)

According to Brinker, while AI has been around for a long time, there were important constraints.

The first of these until quite recently was that the cost of computing power meant that a lot of the things companies using machine learning wanted to do simply were not practical.

That changed during the last decade, largely thanks to cloud computing (and our old friend, Moore's Law)

“What we've seen is that a lot of this analytical machine learning has now become embedded in pretty much all software to a greater or lesser degree,” per Brinker.

A lot of the improvements on the data architecture front are now also feeding into the analytical models that power machine learning, he said. 

“But the much bigger jump is what we see with generative AI, which up until very recently was somewhere between purely hypothetical and ‘oh, that's an interesting science project.’"

With services like ChatGPT and Dall-E emerging, Brinker believes we have arrived at a tipping point.

“It's by no means perfect, and it’s still incredibly immature, but it is now commercially viable.”

With the speed of these advances, Brinker believes AI will start moving up the exponential growth curve.

AR/VR

The constraint here has always been the hardware, according to Brinker who said the choices up to now have largely been between very expensive or very bad.

As an analogy: "Think back to the days of the Motorola flip phone," he said. "If you were trying to create what is today the Apple or Android ecosystem it would just not be possible. But that hardware is now getting there. That's going to hit it. We'll see if Apple is, once again, one of the tipping points in this, they certainly are doing their best for it.”

Whether it's Apple or someone else, he is convinced AR/VR is going to finally land in the mainstream.

“I don’t think it will be this year ... it will take us into next year and beyond before it really gets good."

He said the initial uptake might seem quite small, but it will still be a major advance on what AR/VR has delivered so far. 

Ultimately Brinker expects to see the mass adoption of technology that gets people away from computer screens.

He picks hybrid working as a practical example of utility: “Even if people start going back more to offices, we've come to a world where the people we collaborate with are physically dispersed more often than not.”

Until now, how we collaborate has been constrained by screens he said. Compare that to remote meetings where people might move around in a digital environment, post sticky notes, or write on whiteboards.

“When those things get good, oh my god they are going to change the way we collaborate and do business.”

Software composability

While it may seem a little esoteric, the growing shift towards software composability has big implications for CMOs (and the software vendors who want to keep selling them big, fat marketing tech clouds).

In simple terms, software composability refers to the ability of different software components to work together seamlessly, as if they were a single program. Think of it like building with Lego: each Lego piece can be combined with other pieces to create a larger, more complex structure. In the same way, software components can be combined to create more advanced applications. This allows developers to save time and reuse existing code, making software development more efficient and flexible.

That’s quite a different model from the prevailing approach. 

According to Brinker (whose day job is as the VP of ecosystems for martech vendor Hubspot), for the last few decades we have always thought in terms of software packages. Originally that was shrink-wrapped software that companies bought and physically loaded onto their own computers.

The software typically contained features customers wanted and others they didn’t care about, but still had the privilege of paying for away. 

Cloud computing addressed some of these issues. “That was a big step forward in many ways, but today even though a lot of software runs in the cloud, it's still basically presented as a package."

That shift to the cloud has created the opportunity to do things very differently, he said.

“Now that it's in the cloud, and software has the ability through APIs (application programming interfaces) to connect under the covers, there's already a fair amount of composability happening.”

The new approach also uses what is called a microservices architecture. In simple terms microservices architecture is a way of designing software systems as a collection of small, independent components, called "microservices", that work together to form a larger application. Each microservice is responsible for a specific business function and communicates with other microservices as needed.

Think of it like a restaurant: just like a restaurant has different departments for tasks like cooking, serving, and cleaning, a microservices architecture breaks down a software system into smaller, specialised services that each handle a specific part of the overall functionality.

This makes it easier to develop, test, and deploy each service individually and allows for greater flexibility and scalability. (We also generated the restaurant analogy from ChatGPT which itself was built using microservices.)

The bottom line is that software composability gives a business a lot more control and a lot more choice about the technology it uses to improve customer experiences or manage the business. It is also likely to force large monolithic marketing cloud providers to redesign their offerings in a way that allows customers to take advantage of software composability.

It's already happening. Sitecore, for instance, is doing this, stealing a lead on companies such as Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle.

Web3

The fourth new technology trend is Web3 which refers to what its advocates say is the next generation of the internet, characterised by more advanced technologies and a focus on decentralisation and information immutability – that is, tamper-proof.

Decentralisation refers to distributing power and control away from a single central authority to many different entities. In the context of the internet, this means moving away from centralised systems like social media platforms or search engines that are controlled by a single company, towards systems where the power and control is spread out among many users.

Immutability, on the other hand, refers to the idea that once information is recorded on a Web3 system – basically a blockchain – it cannot be changed or deleted. This is important because it ensures that the information remains accurate and tamper-proof. For example, if you make a financial transaction using a Web3 platform, the details of that transaction would be recorded on a public ledger in a way that cannot be altered, creating a permanent and trustworthy record.

Together, decentralisation and immutability provide a more secure, transparent and democratic way of using the internet, enabling a new era of trust-based interactions online, according to Web3 advocates.

On Web3, Brinker is a little more circumspect: “I’m in the skeptic camp when it comes to crypto and a lot of NFTs.”

Conceptually, however he is attracted to two qualities of the web3 movement: the immutability of digital assets, and the application of the concept of decentralisation to relationships with stakeholder communities. “If 'composability' is composability of technology this almost becomes composability of human relationships in organisations and communities,” he suggested.

Brinker placed his bets 15 years ago on marketing becoming a technology-powered discipline – so far he's been largely on the money.