Deloitte has released the India edition of ‘Tech Trends 2023′. According to the report, whilst pandemic brought significant impact that has begun to break the inertia of digital adoption due to several government policies and initiatives, there is a lot of scope for ecosystem players to come together and accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies across various industries.

This comprehensive publication outlines the trends that are likely to disrupt businesses in the next 18 to 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.

From being a trend setter to being the backbone as a core, technology has revolutionised India to take a leap bringing a unique success story. Today, every business is a tech business where applications are adopted first in India creating compelling use cases as compared to other parts of the world. The report asserts that the FY’2022 has been a spectacular year of India’s tech industry with a record of 15.5 per cent growth (highest ever) to reach $227 billion in revenue with the help of a winning combination of digital and innovation.

Commenting on the report, Keerthi Prakash, Partner, CIO Program Leader, Deloitte India, said, “Current era of digital evolution is as exciting and disruptive as the 80s’ when the internet started it all. Today, business and technology leaders are embracing the XTECH, or extended technology that goes beyond the information technology horizon, breaking into our daily lives and the ecosystem thereby widening the aperture for digital transformation with FinTech, GovTech, RetailTech and MobilityTech leading the pack and impacting the way we transact and see the new digital era. Technologies like AI, cloud and metaverse along with 5G adoption will continue to play a critical role in this evolution journey for India Inc. where we will see a confluence of tech with humans being at the centre driving most of the interactions imperative to the changing dymanics of the world.”

The key trends, as per report, includes the following :-

  • Trend 1: Through the glass – Immersive internet for the enterprise (metaverse) :-

The immersive internet is the next stage in evolution of the video call with the rise of metaverse. As per the market estimates, the metaverse industry in India is expected to grow at an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.1 per cent and touch a whopping $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.

  • Trend 2: 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 per cent 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 and retail, healthcare and industrials and automotive are likely to contribute 60 per cent of the net new value add of $500 billion by FY’2026.

  • Trend 3: Above the clouds: Taming multicloud chaos (metacloud or supercloud):-

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

  • Trend 4: Flexibility, the best ability:-

Reimagining the tech workforce (tech talent) In India, 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 per cent more advantageous, most organisations wish to expand their skills diversity.

  • Trend 5: 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 start-ups 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 that ever before.

  • Trend 6: Connect and extend: Mainframe modernization hits its stride:-

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