Technology Landscape - Other Technologies and Technology-related Area

Maturity

Technology

Opportunities

Impact/Risks

Synthetic media: Recordings or live presentations (video or audio) that use AI to create “fake” content or “deepfakes”

• Use of deepfake “artificial reality identities” to connect with clients and make presentations⁹⁶ 

• Training simulations for education and evaluation 

• Reaching and engaging with larger, more diverse audiences in an efficient way 

• Opportunity for NFTs as it can facilitate determining the authenticity of a physical or digital asset (i.e., virtual/digital content such as photos, videos, audio, or tweets) because the original source of such videos will be tagged in the blockchain underlying the NFT⁹⁷

• Prevalence of mis-/disinformation⁹⁸ to shift public opinion in spite of factual and evidence-based information to the contrary, and resulting challenges in undoing viral social media posts that present such information 

• Use of deepfakes to commit fraud, for example, consider a deepfake of a senior executive at a company or an audit partner commenting on sensitive information circulating around social media⁹⁹

• Identity theft poses a threat to authorization processes 

• Increased need for being alert and applying professional skepticism and having an inquiring mind  

Internet of Things (IoT): Any device (with a built-in sensor) connected to the internet, creating a network of connected devices that collects and shares data about the people and/or environment around it

• Helps to collect and generate data that was previously not available or easily accessible, improving visibility and allowing for improved data analytics, especially when coupled with AI¹⁰⁰ 
• Remote asset management and monitoring, such as location tracking, including autonomous driving applications 
• Improve asset utilization, such as through predictive maintenance of industrial equipment and increased operational efficiencies through IoT-based process automation 
• Common examples of usage in everyday life already include smart home and wearable devices

• Privacy and related issues relating to data collected¹⁰¹ (i.e., could be of sensitive nature such as health data, have varying legal implications across jurisdictions) and “new” risks such as the inadvertent collection of data from such devices 
• Expands the “attack surface” to penetrate a secure network,¹⁰² see discussion on Focus on Data Governance 
• Challenges in quality control and compatibility (i.e., huge numbers of IoT devices that have different standards of quality and security) as well as connectivity (i.e., bandwidth) impact the successful functionality of IoT¹⁰³ 

Digital 5G: The 5th generation of mobile networking with dramatically faster (i.e., by an anticipated 8 to 16 times) upload and download speeds than 4G network

• Predictive intelligence in smart industrial settings and smart cities, including ties to sustainability¹⁰⁴ 
• Enhanced mobile broadband and speeding up large data transfers 
• Accelerating the development and deployment of IoT applications, including edge computing¹⁰⁵

• Increase in 5G mobile powered digital transactions means that companies will need a streamlined way to authenticate users. Digital authentications will need to be more versatile, more frequent and more frictionless than before¹⁰⁶

Immersive digital worlds (“metaverse”): Enabled by augmented reality (“AR”, which augments real-world scenes with additional information overlays) and/or virtual reality (“VR”, which creates a completely virtual environment

• Professional education and evaluation through simulations 
• Specific to audit firms, the pandemic has seen an increase in using AR and drones for remote inventory counting. Nevertheless, uptake is still slow mainly driven by reluctance from regulators and jurisdictional legislation that might not allow virtual inventory taking

• Data privacy, cybersecurity concerns, and lack of identity verifiability¹⁰⁷ 
• Questions over harassment and discrimination in virtual worlds and the lack of research on the physiological impacts on humans of prolonged immersion in VR/AR environments¹⁰⁸ 
• Transactions, many speculative at this point, that are conducted in the metaverse will also have tax and financial reporting implications that are evolving

Edge Computing: Realtime processing of data at the source by combining the use of IoT with cloud computing

• Distinguished from cloud computing, which aggregates data collection from sources before processing it in the cloud 
• Improving response times and decisionmaking, and saving bandwidth by bringing computation closer to the source of data (i.e., important when facing today’s supply chain issues) 
• Allows continuous learning and optimization of the process as data is processed in real-time

• See discussion on Technology Landscape: Cloud Computing

Web 3.0: Envisioned as the third generation of the internet built on a decentralized distributed ledger (i.e., blockchain) and where users can create and own their own data. Web 2.0 is today’s internet built mainly on Javascript and HTML5, which allows user interaction but where relatively few companies own user data, i.e., large technology companies¹⁰⁹

• No central authority controlling the collection, ownership, and flow of information 
• Facilitates blockchain technology and concepts, including digital identity, smart contracts, DeFi and decentralized applications (dApps).¹¹⁰ See section  above on Technology Landscape: Blockchain – Cryptocurrencies, Tokens and Decentralized Finance

• The notion of a “creator” economy will mean a rise in NFTs that serve as products or services which can be bought and sold on the blockchain underlying Web 3.0. Presents questions over data security; data ownership; digital identity; and the identification and mitigation of fraudulent transactions, programming bugs and errors, etc. 
• See also discussion on Technology Landscape: Blockchain – Cryptocurrencies, Tokens and Decentralized Finance 

Quantum computing: Emerging technology that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems “too complex” for today’s computers¹¹¹

• Where today’s supercomputers use a “two-dimensional” approach to solve statistical problems, quantum computing is anticipated to allow a new multidimensional approach to solving statistical problems, meaning that its computing power has increased significantly and can take into account an exponential number of multiple variables and uncertainties as compared to today’s computers 
• Will innovate different method/approach of encryption in face of such massive computing power

• Impact on cybersecurity due to the increased computing power that will effectively render all of today’s public-key encryption systems “useless”. Accordingly, there will be a need to upgrade the technical security for every organization and entity¹¹²

Homomorphic encryption, part of a wider group of technologies called Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs): Allows data to be securely and privately used throughout its lifecycle without the need to decrypt it, meaning that different parties can be given access to work directly on the encrypted data without ever seeing the raw data¹¹³

• Allows businesses to comply with various jurisdictional data protection laws 
• Enables data testing by third parties¹¹⁴ as PETs facilitate privacy protection while data sharing 
• Protects against privacy breaches that could potentially severely harm business reputation

• Computation overhead needs to be significantly decreased as it is still very slow, so not yet practical to use for many applications¹¹⁵ 
• Additionally, integration challenges between data collection points, i.e., IoT (typically designed to consume low energy and storage), and PETs (running PETs typically requires greater computational power) 
• Trade-off between utility and privacy, presenting questions over data authenticity and integrity and reducing transparency in data, for example, impacting the assessment of data used to train AI models 

Cognitive AI: AI with cognitive abilities more similar to a human, including the ability to make decisions in unforeseen environments

• Ability to mimic human behavior and respond to complex problems. See the section above on Technology Landscape: AI

• Cognitive AI will impact decision-making and whether such decisions made by AI have human oversight, are understandable and explainable. See discussion on Technology Landscape: AI