Deloitte released the India edition of its Tech Trends 2023 report on Monday, January 23. This publication outlines the trends that are likely to disrupt businesses in the next 18-24 months, including new opportunities in automation, big data, blockchain, distributed architecture, Internet of Things (IoT) and other areas. It also shows that pioneering organisations are challenging orthodoxies, working smarter, and shifting focus to drive innovation both internally and across their tech ecosystem.

Here are the key trends from the report:

Through the Glass: Immersive internet for the enterprise (metaverse)

The immersive internet is the next stage in the evolution of video calls with the rise of the metaverse. As per the market estimates, the metaverse industry in India is expected to grow at an impressive CAGR of 37.1 percent and touch $758 billion by the end of 2026. In addition to the global tech giants racing to build on the emerging metaverse concept, leading Indian firms are announcing the development of the metaverse as well.

Opening to AI: Learning to trust our AI colleagues

A truly AI-fuelled organisation can differentiate itself from its competitors only by how robustly it uses its AI investments. Approximately 50 percent of organisations plan to increase their investments in artificial intelligence over the next two years, according to Deloitte India's second edition of the 'State of Artificial Intelligence in India' survey, which included 200 Indian business leaders. Furthermore, with AI adoption, the four sectors, namely, BFSI, CPG & retail, healthcare and industrials & automotive are likely to contribute 60 percent of the net new value addition of $500 billion by FY2026.

Also Read: What is ChatGPT and what makes it worth a possible $30 billion?

Above the clouds: Taming multi-cloud chaos (metacloud or supercloud)

From the Indian market perspective, superclouds will be unique, and we will see their emergence. Organisations that have already invested in leading hyper-scalers do not want to be trapped within the walled set of services. Surveys indicate that 84 percent of enterprises in India prefer hybrid multi-cloud as their ideal operating model and that 58 percent are expecting to implement such environments within three years.

The coming of the cloud is something that even Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, talked about during his visit to India earlier this month. Nadella said that we are still at a very nascent stage of cloud adoption and that it has been a "pretty big" game changer. It is still in the early to intermediate innings and moving to the cloud will be 75 percent more efficient.

Flexibility, the best ABILITY: Reimagining the tech workforce

In India, the majority of employers are seeking to expand their workforce despite the buzz of recession, layoffs, and cost-cutting. The top five Indian IT companies hired around 100,000 new employees in 2022 even with the grim market forecasts. Human resources departments must prepare for a non-stop battle for skills in the upcoming year, as the market is enormous for IT contenders. As diverse teams have been proven to be 70 percent more advantageous, most organisations wish to expand the diversity of their skills.

In us, we trust: Decentralised architectures and ecosystems (blockchain-empowered)

India has successfully built foundational digital infrastructure such as Aadhaar, e-Sign and Digi locker along with digitally enabled networks like GSTN. While global response to Web3 is still shaping up, India’s growing economy, demographic dividend, and exponential adoption of emerging technologies across sectors, positioned the country to become one of the highest growth markets for Web3 globally with more than 450 active startups in the space that raised $1.3 billion. From everyday enterprise applications to blockchain native business models, decentralised architectures and ecosystems have started to emerge and are seeing more adoption than ever before.

Connect and extend: Mainframe modernisation hits its stride

While large modernisation programmes are running across organisations to update the core, moving mainframes to newer platforms is seen as either cost-prohibitive or risky. Firms are meeting this challenge by focusing their efforts on tried and tested approaches to the core system modernisation that will allow them to connect a legacy application to even the most modern of tools. From the Indian outlook, the larger impact of this trend is on jobs and skills. India supplies some of the largest mainframe talents to the world through large system integrators and technology GCCs for global organisations.

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(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)