Predictions Ahead: The Next Hot Technologies for Brand Experiences
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Amplified by the latest trends impacting our industry, here’s my take on the emerging experiential technologies that are driving our work today and into the near future.

### The Driving Trends

Over the past few years, three major themes have been driving change across brand experiences:

1.  As Millennials have become the dominant workplace demographic, we’ve [begun redesigning events](http://cramer.com/story/redesigning-sales-meetings-for-millennials/) to meet their expectations.
2.  As leading global events — such as [C2 Montreal](https://cramer.com/story/c2-montreal-2018/) and Dreamforce — have reimagined their experiences, we’ve entered a “[festivalization](http://cramer.com/trend/issue-3/?festivalization)” era for brand experiences.
3.  As the [landscape of event technology providers has grown 70%](http://cramer.com/story/event-tech-landscape-2018/) in the last few years, we’ve ushered in new tools for marketers, event professionals, and attendees.

### The Emerging Experiential Technologies

These three themes have, in turn, pushed marketers into the forefront of emerging experiential technology.

Looking back, we see that **each recent year has been dominated by a few major technologies**:

*   In 2016, [virtual reality and augmented reality](http://cramer.com/story/the-difference-between-ar-and-vr/) drove attendee delight and provided new mechanisms for learning and development.
*   In 2017, marketing and events professionals experimented with [AI-powered networking](http://cramer.com/trend/issue-19/?ai-powered-networking), [brainwear](http://cramer.com/trend/issue-11/?brainwear), and [attendee heat maps](http://cramer.com/trend/issue-14/?attendee-heat-maps).
*   In 2018, we are seeing interesting experiments happening in the fields of [facial recognition](http://cramer.com/trend/issue-26/?%E2%80%8Bpop-up-facial-recognition), [blockchain](http://cramer.com/trend/issue-41/?blockchaining), [live augmented reality](http://cramer.com/trend/issue-5/?live-augmented-reality), and [robotics](http://cramer.com/trend/issue-2/?events-and-robots).

Looking out to 2019, my teams at [Cramer](http://cramer.com/), a global event and experiential marketing agency, and I are predicting that **there will be two big technologies coming next to marketing:** [**gaze-based interfaces**](https://twitter.com/brentrt/status/1007361034502508544) **and** [**generative AI**](https://cramer.com/story/generative-artificial-intelligence/).

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A version of this post was also published over on medium.com.

![Medium logo](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/assets.brentturner.is/_fitWide150/7406/medium-logo.webp)](https://medium.com/@brentrt/predictions-ahead-the-next-hot-technologies-for-brand-experiences-6dd2bfe78590)