Data
2023 will be a boring year for data (and that’s a good thing).
Quite a few MDS SaaS companies will consolidate or struggle to stay afloat.
Some MDS companies will clandestinely migrate towards end-to-end ETL offerings although they won’t call them that.
A managed duckdb service will compete directly with Snowflake/Databricks and give them a run for their money.
Scale-ups and growth stage startups will invest more in data governance and data management.
Governance tooling will evolve further into single-purpose tools instead of one-size-fits-all tools.
Redshift will announce end-of-life.
Snowflake’s Unistore will fail to take-off (at least for now).
Apache Iceberg will become the de-facto lake storage format.
The hype around semantic layers will die.
More data teams will try to implement some version of data contracts or data mesh.
At least a few strong alternatives to dbt-core will emerge by Q2.
Rust ecosystem around data processing will mature some more but will fail to go mainstream.
AI and Tech
AI generated content will overwhelm the internet causing a big impact on some types of creative jobs.
Google will launch an AI interface embedded in GSuite.
It will become difficult to differentiate between AI and Human generated content.
Some regulatory or legal frameworks for AI will start emerging.
Elon will quit Twitter. Most users will come back.
TikTok will not be banned.
Economy
More layoffs but this will eventually stabilize by end of Q1.
Inflation will start going down at the end of Q1.
France or Spain will emerge as the startup capital of Europe.
Travel will go back to 2019 levels.
World
WHO will declare the end of pandemic in Q2.
The risk of right-wing violence in some parts of the world will become very high by Q4.
Russia will withdraw from Ukraine.