10 tech innovations that will revolutionize the digital world

Technology has been shaping the way we work and live for decades. As everything in our world is becoming increasingly digital, new software and applications continue to emerge and arguably make our lives easier.

Whether it’s artificial intelligence, a new web coding format or wearables, unique technology has the power to change the world. To find out what the next big technical innovation is and how it can make an impact, I asked 10 entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council:

What will revolutionize the web in the next five years beyond Facebook and Google, and what effect will this have on your business?

Their best answers are below:

1. Artificial Intelligence

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Artificial Intelligence will continue to change everything as we let machines do more of the work in terms of personalizing recommendations and the content we find. We will converse more with machines and let them take over a lot of our tedious work. It will positively impact my business because I’m working on chatbot technology as we speak. – Murray Newlands, Sighted

2. Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is in. How long is it before people are going to be expecting either features or entire websites that can be “walked through?” For example, if you construct homes, could it be beneficial to include a website feature that allows visitors to walk through the home using VR goggles? Maybe visitors want to walk through your home before ordering an Airbnb type of service. – Matt Doyle, Excel Builders

3. Chatbots

Chatbots will become a standard tool to help with the customer experience and take some of the most menial yet important tasks off the human part of the equation to work on more meaningful areas. For my business, it will help to accumulate more data and insights while maintaining more communication with customers to keep them happy. – Andrew O’Connor, American Addiction Centers

4. Intelligent Verbal Interfaces

Speech recognition is evolving quickly, along with the spoken command interactivity of intelligent personal assistants. I believe that verbal interfaces will multiply in digital computing and largely eliminate the keyboard and mouse, and the large screen from the common business interfaces. This will increase worker mobility within offices and cause a significant increase in remote employment. – Diego Orjuela, Cables & Sensors

5. WebAssembly

WebAssembly is a new standard binary format for the web. Applications compiled to WebAssembly run as fast as native applications. That means games that run in the browser as fast as native games, convincing augmented reality and virtual reality, and web applications as complex and feature-rich as native apps. As a hosting provider, I’m incredibly excited to see the next generation of apps built on our platform. – Vik Patel, Future Hosting

6. Not VR

I don’t know what will have the biggest impact over the next five years, but I can tell you it’s not virtual reality. VR is still sitting in this bizarre universe where the technology is there, but it’s not exactly clear how it can be usefully applied to impact your business. There’s definitely a high demand and it’s going to be huge eventually, but too many people are struggling to even break out of static content for something as paradigm-shifting as VR to become a fundamental game-changer in the next five years. – Simon Berg, Ceros

7. Live-Stream

I expect live-streaming to take off even more than it has. Customers want a personalized experience with a company, despite being halfway around the world. Eventually, people will tire of the produced content uploaded to social media and will want a more authentic experience. – Leila Lewis, Be Inspired PR

8. Drone Delivery

In an on-demand world, we can expect that drone delivery will be commonplace in the near future. And for e-commerce brands such as Amerisleep, we can anticipate the clever use of drones to deliver both product and fun experiences to our customers. Anyone dealing with direct-to-consumer logistics will be thoroughly surprised by what we will be able to accomplish with drones. – Firas Kittaneh, Amerisleep

9. Mobile

I believe mobile devices are revolutionizing the web — more than 50% of web searches are now coming from a mobile device. For brands, and my business especially, focusing on platforms that are mobile-based, such as Instagram and Snapchat, allows for the most business-to-consumer interactions and development of brand loyalty. – Bryanne Lawless, BLND Public Relations

10. Wearables

As AI becomes more sophisticated, the web will have the potential to become more integrated with how we live our life. Wearables will be the way to minimize our direct interaction with the web by automatically supplying data about ourselves and our surroundings, thus providing a new way to search, consume and present information. – Peter Bonac, Bonac Innovation Corp.