Though arenas like e-commerce and social media took a post-pandemic plunge this year, others like gaming, health tech, and automation made headway. Mobile mindfulness grew into a billion-dollar industry.
Climate tech emerged as one of the biggest winners. Increased global attention to renewable energy and a collective race to achieve net zero was a significant boom for EVs, battery technology, and carbon capture. Progress was also made in removing plastic waste from the oceans.
Automation was another highlight, as companies progressed with robotic process automation (RPA), mobility-as-a-service, and collaborative robots. Stanford researchers call advancements in foundational machine learning models like GPT-3 a “paradigm shift.” Though there’s increasing recognition that AI bots don’t always tell the truth and it can be hard to know when.
