Think of any business or organization; software technology is at the heart of their operations. This puts Marc Andreessen's prescient ‘software is eating the world’ quote into perspective. It is only reasonable to start speculating about potential technology developments for 2023 as the year 2022 draws to a close. Here are a few technology trends that we see becoming more prominent in 2023: 

Synthetic Reality

Immanuel Kant in his Transcendental Idealism theory as read in his magnum opus, ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’, proposed that all of what we perceive as reality is socially constructed. With the rise and prominence of “deep fakes” in the early 2020s, a hyper-augmented improvement on ‘deep fake’ technology has now ensued in the form of synthetic reality. Like in ‘deep fake technology’, synthetic reality deploys deep learning to augment and alternate reality - mostly with human appearances rather than hyper-realistic geospatial environments that virtual reality is more entrenched in creating. The defining departure that synthetic reality is offering from deep fakes is its ability to foresee user behaviors and/or inputs and make necessary adjustments to produce the optimum results; or more technically, the augmentation of the experiences it can create using machine learning.

This surreal but eerie twitter video demonstrates the exciting prospects of the technology. We anticipate that in 2023, we will see more synthetic reality in modern applications and multimedia platforms. We also add to Kant’s transcendental idealism theory that technology definitely can construct new forms of reality. 

Artificial General Intelligence

You definitely have read about ChatGPT or heard about it somewhere on the internet. And if you haven’t, it is time to welcome Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) into your consciousness. Developments in this space have significant implications for our daily lives and the business operations of startups, organizations, corporations, and small businesses. AGI is a category of artificial intelligence capable of comprehending or learning and executing any intellectual work that a human being is capable of. It is also referred to as strong AI or AGI. In contrast to narrow AI, which is restricted to a single domain or job, AGI is a type of AI capable of carrying out various tasks and processes at a level of intelligence comparable to that of humans. CHATGPT exemplifies this concise explanation of AGI in the sense that it can adequately carry out intellectual tasks like writing articles, briefs, or emails, strategy proposals, summarizing or paraphrasing written texts, and even writing or improving software codes. 2023 will be the year that AGI finally gains reckoning and starts to see its use cases deployed on an enterprise level. 

Do-Everything-Apps (Super Apps)

We anticipate a resurgence of "Super App" startups and companies in 2023, mostly supported by business models primed towards vertical integration to increase multi-cycle revenue streams and reduce development costs. This follows a fairly awful year for technology companies and startups, mostly plagued by macroeconomically influenced mass layoffs. Already, new Twitter owner, Elon Musk, has commenced proceedings to turn Twitter into a super app called ‘X’. This ‘everything app’ would delve into payments, live-streaming, e-commerce, and probably gaming. Vertical integration has always been a time-honored decision-making pathway for businesses to establish business moats and maintain positive growth trends, and we predict that technology businesses in 2023 would entrench the practice of deploying it in the form of ‘do-everything-applications’. A blueprint for this could be China’s technology behemoth, WeChat. 

Alternative Financial Technology (Alt FinTech)

Financial Technology particularly in Africa continues to grow in leaps and bounds - with Business Day even reporting revenue growth projections of up to $230 billion by 2025. The consumers of these services continue to account for the formulation of alternative financial products. These include (but are not limited to) tech-enabled savings, tech-enabled investments in foreign securities, and tech-enabled trading in foreign capital markets. Thus, we define this inadequately-explained ecosystem to be Alternative Financial Technology or Alt FinTech. In the African technology industry at the very least, the prominence of Alt Fintech as a products and services offering will emerge as a major technology trend in the coming year. We at Kwakol are bullish about our prospects of playing a pivotal role in Alt FinTech emerging as a technology trend in 2023, globally, but from an African starting point. 

Publicly-Listed Technology Companies (Africa/Nigeria)

While 2021 was the peak year for Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) for technology startups and companies globally, 2022 has witnessed a general lull in that regard due to the global macroeconomic downturn. Regardless, with new policy announcements in Nigeria, it is expected that African technology players will have a new option to consider for raising capital in 2023. Technology Startups in Nigeria and Africa will now be able to list on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NGX) after the country's Security Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the listing requirements for the technology board. The NGX Technology Board is expected to be a specialized method for listing and raising money for technology-based businesses. Qualified institutional investors as well as high-net-worth individuals and retail investors will have access to the NGX technology board. 

Conclusion

2023 will be a year of continued technological innovation and advancements. We anticipate the emergence of Synthetic Reality, Artificial General Intelligence, Do-Everything-Apps (Super Apps), Alternative Financial Technology (Alt FinTech), and publicly listed Nigerian/African technology companies as the major technology trends in 2023. Synthetic Reality will enable us to construct new forms of reality, Artificial General Intelligence will enable us to execute a growing list of intellectual tasks that humans are capable of, Do-Everything-Apps (Super Apps) will enable businesses to deploy vertical integration to enhance their optionality, increase multi-cycle revenue streams and reduce development costs, and Alternative Financial Technology (Alt FinTech) will enable the growth of tech-enabled savings, investments, and trading in foreign capital markets. Also, a flurry of Publicly-Listed Technology companies in Nigeria and the African continent will be able to access African capital in new ways that are significantly easier and more attuned to their evolution...

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