Adobe's chief product officer predicts 8 tech trends of 2021

Scott Belsky, the chief product officer of Adobe and founder of Behance, Adobe's social media platform shares insight into tech trends that will be shaping 2021.

The notion of "decentralized" is spreading to unexpected places.

This year, Bitcoin gains surpassed 220%, buoyed by demand from larger investors attracted to its potential for a quick profit and perceived inflation-hedging qualities.

Therefore, Belsky predicts that cryptocurrency will now be incorporated into businesses in the coming year for example the team at Braintrust is using blockchain to create a user-controlled talent network. Instead of charging fees or per centage of the participant’s income, the company gains value alongside other participants via tokens that become more valuable as the network grows.

Behold the era of "eduployment:" The process of identifying a trade, getting an education, and getting a job (or starting a company) will become fully integrated.

This year the world faced immense poverty amid the coronavirus outbreak hence going forward rather than investing in expensive education the world will shift focus towards a new eduployment model. For example, companies such as Nana and Main Street will train individuals as a painter or appliance repairer and then set you up in a marketplace to start getting jobs in your local area or start your own business.

A few seemingly quirky social apps will tune into the under 16 demographic's distinct approach to creation as a form of self-expression and tolerance for transparency by default.

“I'm seeing more entrepreneurs starting social apps now than in years past, and they're no longer building off of Facebook's graph or emulating existing products with slight iterations. Nope, these are (finally) wildly new and original ideas. One of my favorites, under the radar but experiencing rapid growth, is ItsMe,” Belsky told Business Insider.

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ItsMe is an app that connects you with others based on your mood, it helps users create their own appearance, and allows you to communicate with text, voice, audio, or drawing among other forms.

The next-generation social media platforms will offer more privacy and will have lesser creative constraints hence he believes that the future of social media is promising.

Talent will increasingly own their audience, with the rise of "channels of one" and community-as-a-service.

Content creators will rise through platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, talent will own their audience and generate their money through ads.

For example platforms such as Substack-where, you build and monetize your own email list will emerge in video, communities, and other ways to build, manage and monetize your audience.

“I am especially enthusiastic about products like Circle and Geneva that power fully-fledged community functionality for brands and individuals. If you're a content creator of any kind, you can now spin up a community to gather your audience and spawn all sorts of offshoot services to delight (and monetize) your base,” he says.

Instagram and YouTube will be left to fulfill marketing initiatives. Hence moving forward talent will be to redirecting everyone they are able to reach on other platforms to their own privately owned and managed channel.

More and more niche functions of enterprise will become multi-player, powered by the next generation of highly specialized, AI-bolstered, enterprise companies with consumerized product experiences.

Functions such as financial planning, design, and much more were once done by a team of experts by SaaS tools which are simpler to use, and inclusive of stakeholders across the company.

The way businesses once operated will completely be changed, different companies will be hired to fulfill these functions for example Globality will take on procurement, Sora will take care of HR interactions, Meter for WiFi and IT, Welcome will be hiring, closing, and onboarding new employees.

Creativity tools will be deployed across the enterprise, much like productivity tools were deployed in previous decades.

Artificial intelligence will take over boring labor at the workplace; skills such as creativity that are unique to humans will shine. Thinking outside the box and generating attractive graphics to make compelling presentations in meetings will be more valued in the future.

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“Obviously, this is a major focus in my day job as chief product officer for my creative teams at Adobe. We see this massive broadening of the market divided into two types of personas: content-first creators and collaboration-first creators, says Belsky.

“The former wants to be start with something  —  an image, a video or a graphic  —  and remix or deconstruct. The latter starts by bringing together a group of people and leveraging shared assets (we've been gradually turning Creative Cloud into a "creative system" of sorts for this very purpose. Of course, this need requires new types of tools on modern platforms like the web. Adobe, along with a whole ecosystem of new apps, is working to make this happen,” he says.

New and disruptive interfaces will emerge that aggregate and connect the underlying services we use to live and work.

We currently have specialize apps for managing different documents, files, and folders for our work and personal life. All of these various cloud documents and services have different schemas and don't interact with one another and it can become quite messy.

Companies such as Command E, which is an easy keyboard shortcut to open any document, contact, file, or record from the cloud are here to provide a solution for this, and moving forward such apps will be in great demand.

Another round of the Roaring '20s is ahead of us, where the pent-up desires from the pandemic will be unleashed in the form of fashion, travel, and culture-bending creative self-expression.

Many businesses especially in the fashion industry suffered due to the coronavirus pandemic as the world became homebound. With the release of the Covid-19 vaccine, everyone will jump back into the world of travel, fashion, parties, concerts, and meeting new people.