This article presents our assessment of the trends that will matter for small businesses in 2018. There are three. The first two are well established; the third is less certain, and the reasons are explained below.
Privacy, because the GDPR deadline is five months away and the year has brought one data breach after another. Video, because every platform is promoting it heavily. And AI, which is appearing in small ways inside tools businesses already use every day.
Why will privacy become a selling point rather than a footnote?
Because regulation, browsers and public opinion are all moving in that direction. For most small businesses, privacy currently means a paragraph of legal text at the bottom of the site, copied from elsewhere and read by nobody. That is likely to change next year.
The GDPR applies from May 25, 2018, and it reaches any business with customers in Europe. We covered how to prepare for it from this region in September. Since then, the subject has become more concrete. Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari this fall, which discreetly limits how advertisers follow people from site to site. In October, Chrome began displaying a "Not secure" warning on plain HTTP pages whenever a user types into them, and Google has stated that it plans eventually to flag every HTTP page.
The news has reinforced the trend: Equifax in September, and last month Uber's admission that it had concealed a breach from a year earlier affecting some 57 million riders and drivers. The general public, not only technology professionals, is beginning to ask what companies know about them and how that information is used.
Our recommendation for 2018 is therefore to treat privacy as part of the product: collect less, explain clearly what is kept and why, use HTTPS and allow people to unsubscribe in one click. These measures are inexpensive now and will be far more difficult to implement under pressure in May.
Level of certainty: high. The pace at which public opinion shifts is harder to predict, but the indications point to a faster change than many expect.
Will video become the default format?
Yes, although the platforms and formats where it performs best are changing. Facebook is promoting video heavily. Instagram Stories is a little over a year old and growing quickly. YouTube remains central. Most social media professionals describe video as the future, and we largely agree.
There is, however, an important qualification. Facebook has been testing a separate "Explore" feed in a handful of countries that moves Page posts out of the main news feed. This week, it announced that it will begin lowering the reach of posts that solicit likes and shares. The direction is clear: Pages will reach fewer people organically, not more. A 2018 plan that relies solely on posting more video to a Facebook Page should include an alternative.
The formats most likely to perform well:
- Stories, the vertical format that disappears after 24 hours: informal, quick and filmed on a phone. Small businesses do this well precisely because it does not need to be polished.
- YouTube, for evergreen content: course previews, how-to videos and "what to expect" videos that people search for. We covered this in the spring for dive centres, and the same advice applies to any small tourism business.
- Paid video on Facebook and Instagram, because organic reach is declining and a small budget still goes a long way.
What will not change?
People want to see a place before they go. A genuine clip of a terrace, a beach, a boat or a kitchen, filmed on a phone, accomplishes more than a paragraph. Formats will continue to shift; that need will remain.
Level of certainty: high that video will dominate, moderate on which formats. Long-form Facebook video appears to offer limited prospects for small businesses.
How will AI appear in everyday software?
Gradually, inside tools businesses already use. This is the least precise item on the list, and potentially the one that will matter most, although its form remains difficult to predict.
At present, "AI" for small businesses mainly means two things. The first is chatbots, most of which perform poorly. The second is machine learning embedded in familiar products. Gmail added Smart Reply to its mobile apps in May, offering short suggested responses at the bottom of an email. Google Photos can find "beach" or "dog" in pictures without tags. Google Lens is beginning to appear on Pixel phones: pointing the camera at an object identifies it. Google Translate has improved markedly since it became neural last year. Smart speakers are also likely among this week's holiday gifts.
None of this resembles a revolution. It resembles software becoming somewhat more capable every few months.
The research suggests a larger change. In October, DeepMind published AlphaGo Zero, which taught itself Go from the rules alone and defeated the version that had beaten the world's best players. In June, a Google team published a translation paper titled "Attention Is All You Need," covered on our blog in July, presenting a new design that trains faster and handles language better. Neither is a product available for purchase, but both resemble the foundations on which future products are built.
What can reasonably be expected in 2018?
AI will continue to enter everyday tools, and small businesses will use it without calling it AI: better translation, better photo search, smarter email and possibly reliable voice search on phones. None of it will replace anyone.
The longer-term outlook is uncertain. If machines become genuinely proficient at language, the impact on small businesses could be significant, since much of their weekly work is language: emails, descriptions, replies to reviews and translations. This area deserves close monitoring.
Level of certainty: high that AI will spread into everyday tools, low on the scale of its eventual impact, which could be modest or very large. The research trend, however, argues against underestimating it.
What should a small business do in January?
We recommend three concrete steps.
Devote one afternoon to privacy: an inventory of the data collected, a cleaned mailing list, and HTTPS if it is not yet in place.
Devote one afternoon to video: select five questions guests ask every week and plan a short video for each. Begin posting Stories, even if the first ones are imperfect.
Spend an hour exploring the AI features already available on the phone and in email: Smart Reply, the translation app and photo search. These will not transform a business in 2018, but knowing what already exists makes it easier to recognize what is coming. In our view, that is the real purpose of any AI training: knowing what to adopt and what to disregard.
For those who wish to follow the research without reading academic papers, the Google AI blog is one of the sources we monitor. It should be read with appropriate caution, since it is a company describing its own work, but many changes appear there first, well before anyone attempts to sell them to businesses.
These are our three trends for 2018, and we will review them at the end of the year.