From the podcast: taking a crystal ball to tech in 2017.

• Author: Christensen, Lisa
• Position: Around Utah

It's tough to say just what the next year has in store, but there are a few areas of technology that are poised to explode in 2017, said TEEM co-founder and CEO Shaun Ritchie in a recent episode of UB Insider.

"There's so much happening in tech right now. Utah is a fantastic place for a lot of the development of the tech scene in general. People talk about Silicon Valley; I think Utah has a huge presence in helping shape a lot of those technologies that maybe aren't always consumer-facing technologies but there's a lot of underlying technologies," said Ritchie.

For the Internet of Things, or IoT, the connectivity is reaching a point of real usefulness, Ritchie said. In manufacturing, putting sensors on different parts of machines can send alerts when the machine begins to malfunction. Had there been such sensors on Deepwater Horizon, for example, he said, the malfunction that led to the 2010 fatal explosion and largest oil leak in U.S. waters might have been prevented.

"GE [General Electric] is doing some pretty amazing things around the industrial world. And there's all these manufacturing pieces," Ritchie said. "You know, when we're actually making things and embedding things and so your elevators or your turbines or things like that can start talking to you and tell you when they're having a problem. And you can start getting that data more real time."

Closer to home, IoT connectivity can mean a refrigerator can alert an owner when they're out of milk, or offices can run more efficiently with the mundane minutia taken care of automatically.

IoT works closely with artificial intelligence, which Ritchie said is more along the lines of electronic assistants like Siri, Cortana or Alexa, or home security systems than futuristic robots. Those systems will also further increase efficiency for people at home or in the office.

"[With] things like Google Home and Alexa, we're going to start seeing the proliferation of this kind of interaction. We've seen it for a long time with Siri and with other kinds of consumer tech," said Ritchie. "I think we're going to start seeing some real impacts in 2017 as far as individual worker productivity, where [we] can interact with an Al tool to be able to get our jobs done faster and quicker and better so we can really focus on the work that we need to do rather than all of the logistics around work."

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