​The soup-and-sandwich café chain has been rethinking customer service across its 2,000-plus outlets, implementing a series of technology-infused initiatives it calls Panera 2.0. The project drives orders through digital platforms that simplify food prep in the back of the house while expediting the customer experience. And it’s paying off: Twenty-four percent of the company’s sales are made through in-store kiosks, on the web, or on the Panera app (only the pizza giants drive more digital business), and 9% of customers opt to order ahead and pick up in a café. Panera’s same-store sales growth in 2016 was 4.2%, well above the industry average. “We asked ourselves, ‘What’s going to be next?’ ” says CEO Ron Shaich, “and then we made the long-term commitment to build it ourselves.”

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There are people with huge Instagram reach and an affinity for Taco Bell, who the chains hires as partners. These partners are paid to post photos (or Snapchats, or YouTube videos) of Taco Bell on their own accounts. Taco Bell is increasingly reaching out to "micro-influencers," or people who may not have a huge social reach but who are trusted and relevant in their communities. 

"We all think about our personal brands — anyone who participates in social media is almost intuitively thinking about how to document experiences and how things become badges," Marisa Thalberg, Taco Bell's CMO, said.

In other words, while Taco Bell has a brand, so do it's customers. In 2017, Taco Bell's success depends on becoming a part of their customers' personal brands — and convincing them to help market the chain's new menu offerings.

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Over the past few years, computers have become incredibly good at recognizing faces, and the technology is expanding quickly in China in the interest of both surveillance and convenience. Face recognition might transform everything from policing to the way people interact every day with banks, stores, and transportation services.

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Smarter computers, algorithms and dedicated AI systems are a fintech dream. Faster decision-making and deeper learning (recognising, for example, predictors of financial turbulence) are obvious and huge boons to financial organisations. But if your investment in the world of high finance only extends as far as tapping your debit card on a reader in the supermarket, things are about to change for you, as well. The panicked phone call to the bank’s Lost and Stolen department may become a thing of the past - as will the questions from your spouse about why and how you apparently withdrew £300 from an ATM in Ukraine last night while you were sitting together rewatching Game of Thrones. And once again: that future is dictated by smarter computing, and forms of artificial intelligence that can tell you-at-home from you-in-Odessa. In fact, the technology protecting you from financial fraud might have nothing to do with traditional plastic: in the not-so-far future, you’ll carry your financial security around your neck, on your wrist, or not at all.

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Targeted advertising is familiar to anyone browsing the Internet. A startup called Synaps Labs has brought it to the physical world by combining high-speed cameras set up a distance ahead of the billboard (about 180 meters) to capture images of cars. Its machine-learning system can recognize in those images the make and model of the cars an advertiser wants to target. A bidding system then selects the appropriate advertising to put on the billboard as that car passes.

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We are now in the early stages of the next technological revolution: the development of a ubiquitous wireless network that will marry data collection and computation with billions of devices. This will provide us with unprecedented insights and abilities that will change what we do and how we do it. This network is called 5G. Unlike its predecessors, 5G is a technological paradigm shift, akin to the shift from typewriter to computer. And it isn’t just a network. 5G will become the underlying fabric of an entire ecosystem of fully connected intelligent sensors and devices, capable of overhauling economic and business policies, and further blurring geographical and cultural borders. It will be capable of delivering at every rung of the ecosystem’s ladder, and will provide seamless, continuous connectivity for business applications.

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