Self-braking cars, machine learning on mobile devices, biometrics on your smartphone, and indoor navigation accurate up to a few metres are some of the innovations and disruptive changes set to transform the world in 2017 and beyond. Deloitte’s annual Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) Predictions report identifies the key market developments and trends expected to impact the market over the next 12-18 months.

1. TMT Predictions 2017
Think about the future

2. A braking news story

3. 1
Deloitte predicts that cars with automatic
emergency braking (AEB) will represent almost
100 percent of all new cars sold in 2022 in the US,
marking the biggest auto safety breakthrough since
the seatbelt.
#DeloittePredicts

4. 1
A brake-out innovation…
While self-driving cars may still be years
away, cars with AEB are a growing part of the
market in 2017. The technology uses sensors to
automatically brake when a collision is imminent.
Where the average driver takes a couple of seconds
to react to a surprise obstruction, auto braking
takes milliseconds. Velocity is reduced by half,
and kinetic energy by even more. Result?
Fewer injuries and deaths.
#DeloittePredicts

5. 1
That doesn’t brake the bank
Over 38,000 people are estimated to die in
US auto accidents annually. AEB is expected to
reduce accident fatalities by over 16%, saving nearly
6,000 lives each year in the US. Global auto deaths
are over 1.25 million, and AEB will reduce that toll
too, but at a slower pace. While self-driving
systems typically cost $25,000 per car, lifesaving
AEB technology is currently priced at only $500.
And consumers actually prefer it to fully
autonomous cars!
#DeloittePredicts

6. Let your fingers
do the talking

7. 2
Deloitte predicts more than one billion
fingerprint-enabled devices will be on the market
in 2017. Most will be used, and over 30 times per
day. That’s going to be 10-trillion-plus fingerprints
read for the year, but who’s counting?
#DeloittePredicts

8. 2
Prints charming
Have you ever struggled to remember a
password? Was it capital or lowercase?
A symbol or a number? By 2020, the average
user may have over 200 online accounts, and
sharing passwords between them is a security
hazard. What if you never had to remember
another password again?
#DeloittePredicts

9. 2
A solution is at hand!
I mean, at your finger
We predict fingerprint readers to be ubiquitous
on smartphones and tablets by the end of the
decade, and a growing number of applications will
adopt fingerprints as an alternative to passwords.
Fingerprints are more secure and can’t be hacked
or forgotten. They could also offer a more secure
alternative to PINs in banking, keys and passes
in physical security, and enhance the security of
government-issued ID.
#DeloittePredicts

10. Get lost!

11. 3
Deloitte predicts that, within five years,
a quarter of all digital navigation will be used
indoors, providing directions with accuracy to
within a few metres.
#DeloittePredicts

12. 3
Getting you from here…
Have you ever wandered everywhere,
searching for something at the mall? Or gotten
lost in an airport? We use GPS to get directions
every day, but GPS technology doesn’t
work indoors. That’s all about to change as
satellites, WiFi, and Bluetooth beacons will
work with your smartphone to show you where
to go, and even which floor you are on.
#DeloittePredicts

13. 3
To there
We expect global investment in what we call
“indoor navigation” to reach $1 billion dollars
this year, with approximately 50–100 startups
working in this sector. This amount will grow,
quickly, as outdoor navigation is already a
$56-billion industry. Real estate, retail, and
telecom all look to be impacted by this
new technology.
#DeloittePredicts

14. Niche appeal

15. 4
Deloitte predicts that 2017 sales of tablets
will be fewer than 165 million units, down about
10 percent from the 182 million units sold in
2016. Not a precipitous decline, but it does suggest
we’ve passed peak demand for these devices.
#DeloittePredicts

16. 4
What goes up…
Introduced in 2010, only seven short years ago,
tablet computers shipped more than 200 million
units in each of 2013, 2014, and 2015—in some
ways riding a crest of dissatisfaction over that time
with the relatively small screen size of smartphones
and the heavy weight of laptops.
#DeloittePredicts

17. 4
Must come down
As phones got bigger and laptops got lighter,
tablets are no longer the hot commodity they
once were. In fact, when asked which devices
they valued the most, Americans ranked
tablets at 29 percent, lower than the levels
seen in 2012–2014, and about half or less than
the levels seen for smartphones (76 percent),
laptops (69 percent), and even desktop
computers (57 percent.)
#DeloittePredicts

18. Rise of the machines

19. 5
Rise of the machines
Deloitte predicts that over 300 million
smartphones, or more than a fifth of units sold
in 2017, will have on-board machine-learning
capability, allowing them to perform important tasks
even when network connectivity is unavailable.
This will have massive implications not only for the
privacy and security of everyday mobile device users
but, more importantly, for disaster relief, eventual
Internet of Things (IoT) cybersecurity, and
health care.
#DeloittePredicts

20. 5
While you read this…
Some tasks performed by computers are
straightforward: a push of a button on a keyboard
is translated into binary information that the
device is programmed to recognize. But other
functions cannot be programmed in the same way.
Recognizing a face, for instance—especially
whose face it is—in a world of varying light
sources, hats, and hair is remarkably challenging.
Same goes for voice recognition and language
translation.
#DeloittePredicts

21. 5
Your smartphone
is getting smarter
With machine learning, devices can get better
at performing tasks through exposure to data,
rather than explicit programming. Time was, that
required massive computational power of the sort
only found in clusters of energy-consuming, cloud-
based computer servers equipped with specialized
processors. Not anymore…your smartphone just
grew a brain.
#DeloittePredicts

22. Can you hear me now?

23. 6
Deloitte predicts that significant steps toward
fifth generation, or 5G, wireless networks will be
launched this year. Soon, you’ll be able to upload
those selfies faster than ever!
#DeloittePredicts

24. 6
Putting the new network…
5G will be a significant improvement to existing
4G networks, but will probably not be launched
in its entirety until 2020. However, operators will
begin rolling out enhanced 4G networks called
LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) and LTE-A Pro, offering
faster speeds and a taste of 5G’s potential.
Call them 4.5G if you want. Speeds could reach
multiple GB/s, meaning you could download the
new Star Wars in seconds—even in HD.
#DeloittePredicts

25. 6
To work
A further innovation is that LTE-A networks
offer improved support for IoT devices. LTE-A
will incorporate a low power network that connects
a large number of battery powered devices, even
in basements or deep inside buildings where
cell reception may not otherwise reach. Finally,
texting on the subway!
#DeloittePredicts

26. Greatly evaluated

27. 7
Deloitte predicts that US TV advertising
revenue in 2017 will be even with 2016, although
up or down a percent or two is possible. Not itself
necessarily the stuff of great television drama,
but for an industry widely thought to be on the same
sharply negative trend as other traditional media,
flat is the new up.
#DeloittePredicts

28. 7
Couch plateau
Think about it: people have been predicting the
death of US network TV since the early 1970s.
More than four decades later, they’re still wrong.
Buoyed in part by the summer Olympics and
the presidential election, television ad revenues
in the US were about $72 billion in 2016, up
3.5 percent over the year before.
#DeloittePredicts

29. 7
Glad men
The fact is, TV ads may be recapturing some of
the dollars that had been moving to digital. Why?
Video streaming lacks television’s mass appeal,
live viewing remains dominant over “time-shifted”
DVR viewing, and viewing overall remains robust.
Although not growing the way it used to and losing
share, traditional TV advertising remains important
for advertisers. After all, traditional TV still gets over
1,800 hours per year of adult Americans’ time, and
even more for the fast-growing 65+ demographic.
#DeloittePredicts

30. Fashion plate

31. 8
Deloitte predicts the market for vinyl records
are likely to enjoy a seventh consecutive year of
double-digit growth in 2017, with about 40 million
discs sold, generating US$800-$900 million and an
average revenue per unit just over US$20.
#DeloittePredicts

32. 8
Circling the turntable…
For many buyers, the record has become a
collectible, a proudly physical format and an
expression of individuality in a largely digital world.
As media consumption becomes increasingly
intangible—streaming services usurping digital
music downloads; websites and apps replacing
print—vinyl is permanent and, for some, worthy
of display. Even apparel and food retailers are
getting in on the action, selling records and players
in their stores.
#DeloittePredicts

33. 8
Not the drain
Vinyl’s peak is past, of course—in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, when the record was the predominant
way of listening to pre-recorded music, over half a
billion records were sold annually in the US alone. In
2017, an estimated 15 million individuals globally
may purchase a small number of records at a high
unit price relative to most other music formats—
significant, but nevertheless niche, and not likely to
expand much.
#DeloittePredicts

34. It came from
beyond the web

35. 9
Deloitte predicts that Distributed
Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks will
become larger in scale, more frequent,
and harder to mitigate, with some attacks
reaching a terabit/s on a monthly basis.
#DeloittePredicts

36. 9
Cybersecurity finds itself…
DDoS attacks are an increasingly common method
of crashing websites by flooding them with too much
traffic from many IP addresses at once. Netflix,
PayPal, and the New York Times websites were all
crashed by DDoS in 2016. As the scale of attacks
has increased, defenses have grown accordingly,
but 2017 may mark the year that hackers exploit IoT
devices and lead this game of cat and mouse.
#DeloittePredicts

37. 9
In a state of denial
The IoT connects billions of devices—cameras,
sensors, routers, and appliances—some with
factory-installed passwords. Hackers may be able
to access millions of these devices at once and use
them in their attacks. The Mirai attack in 2016 made
use of connected devices and the hacker posted
instructions online, encouraging copycats.
#DeloittePredicts

38. It’s flextime

39. 10
Deloitte predicts that, by the end of
2018, spending on flexible consumption
models (FCM), or “IT-as-a-service,” will exceed
$500 billion worldwide, up nearly 50 percent
over 2016. FCM won’t have become ubiquitous
by that time, but it will still be growing rapidly.
#DeloittePredicts

40. 10
Stretch goals
It used to be the norm that enterprises bought,
rented, or leased IT and telecom hardware. A
company with a thousand office employees had to
have at least a thousand computers and a thousand
telephone handsets on the premises, plus the
software and systems to run them. But with the
emergence of FCM, this model is going the way of
the dodo.
#DeloittePredicts

41. 10
Growth spurt
For many enterprises, large and small, FCM is
appealing because it allows them to avoid significant
capital expenditures and provides a predictable
expense based on actual use—which is in turn easily
scaled up or down based on business needs. And
while both the traditional ownership IT model and
FCM will continue to coexist for years, there is an
ongoing shift toward FCM. At current rates of
growth, FCM will likely represent more than
half of IT spending by 2021 or 2022.
#DeloittePredicts

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