On March 8, CompTIA Chief Technology Evangelist James Stanger and CompTIA Senior Director, Technology Analysis, Seth Robinson offered their insights into emerging technology, digital transformation and more in the latest CompTIA IT Pro Webinar, Critical Emerging Technologies Today: A Report.

Stanger began by stating that technology does not enter the workplace as quickly as we might presume. He cited the Gartner Hype Cycle, which outlines the process of how initial enthusiasm and inflated expectations transition to realistic expectations and adoption.

Robinson added that a recent example of this was cloud computing, although the cycle for cloud happened much faster than what can be expected for other emerging technologies.

“Cloud computing’s cycle was incredibly compressed in terms of making it through all of these stages, getting to the point of adoption,” he said. “When we start to look at some of the trends that followed after cloud computing … they’ve made their way through this cycle in a similar way as to what we’ve seen in the past…. Most technologies progress through this over the course of years. It’s not going to be overnight that we’re going to see these things transform.”

After discussing the evolution of cloud computing and how technology advances have moved from the corporate to consumer realm, Robinson responded to whether or not there’s an advantage to early adoption.

“The viewpoint on adoption has shifted, and where there might have been resistance before, there may be a little less resistance now, because even though you can wait [if your device is not at the end of its life], there’s this fear that you’re falling behind competitively, and you want to try and use some of these new technologies to differentiate yourself,” he said. “I think people generally want to move to the left and become early adopters, but those early adopters are trying to race to the front.”

Both experts agreed that it’s not just about the technology.

“A lot of this emerging technology is about digital transformation,” Stanger said. “As companies look around to embrace a new technology, they’re realizing we not only need to modernize our processes, but we need to fundamentally change them.”

Robinson noted that the consumerization and democratization of technology have made it easier to use and transformed people’s everyday lives.

“Something that was never digital before can now be on the network, and you can make your business better,” he said.

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), Stanger said that while we can program machines to make predictions based on conditions or take context into account, it cannot replace jobs that require human judgement.

“AI can do what the programmers have told it to do. It can do some learning on its own … but programmers are still giving parameters, and there’s a lot of training that goes into AI,” he said. “When we get into the things it can’t do, there will always be some limits, but the bounds will change as we do more training and expand the parameters.”

The hour-long webinar continued with discussions around blockchain, networking as it applies to emerging technology and emerging technology at the service desk. The presentation concluded with insights into cybersecurity and emerging technology.

“For any piece of emerging technology that you pick out, [you cannot] automatically assume that new tech is more secure,” Robinson said. “It’s what you do around it.”

Before heading into the Q&A session, Stanger closed with a final thought on emerging technology and security.

“To me, the more that you can take a look at your business processes and truly transform your company’s technology and your security approach, then you’re going to be able to use these technologies much more efficiently,” he said.

To earn continuing education units toward the renewal of CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+ and CompTIA Cloud+, watch the complete on-demand webinar.