An underdog’s cloud effort: Google gives expanding its cloud market share another try with its AlloyDB database service that’s priced to sell. Its other cloud products could reap benefits too.

Close to 75% US marketers will tap influencers for campaigns this year, up about 5 percentage points from 2021.

By 2026, nearly 30% of US consumers’ average retail spending (excluding food and beverage sales and ticketing) will be made using proximity mobile payments, as providers look to build on the pandemic-driven adoption of the technology.

Neobank and Big Tech competition, rising mobile adoption, and new touchpoints like the metaverse are pushing banks to rethink their branch footprints. They must react to evolving consumer banking preferences so they can future-proof their branches.

Despite current challenges, Amazon will recapture ecommerce market share. With Amazon’s stock price under intense pressure, don’t expect CEO Andy Jassy to take these struggles lying down. We expect Amazon will play to its strengths with the value and convenience of Prime membership to improve the top line, win back softening ecommerce market share, and re-accelerate its ad business.

Can Meta sustain its VR headset dominance? It has 90% market share, but its Horizon Worlds metaverse apps are only accessible in the US and Canada, leaving room for new entrants to compete.

Our most recent forecast shows that conversational AI adoption is growing. In 2021, 64.2% of US adults between the ages of 25–34 used a voice assistant. Overall, 46.9% of US adults will use a voice assistant in 2022, 48.2% by 2025. Conversational AI is on track to become a mainstream technology in practically every vertical.

This could entail educational campaigns about processes like loading cards into mobile wallets or how to pay in-store, displayed at merchants’ POS—a tactic that has lifted US adoption.

Proximity and peer-to-peer mobile payments are on the rise in the UK, thanks to high user adoption of mobile and banking. However, growth is slow, which means that wallet providers looking to crack the market will need to get creative.

Matter rollout delayed because of growing adoption: More smart home manufacturers want in on the industry standard, but could delays stop larger manufacturers from releasing products?

ES: Pricing, performance, and ease of use dictated who owned the market in the early days of personal computing. Today, VR ecosystems and platforms continue that trend as the metaverse takes shape: Consumers, developers, and content producers will eventually decide the future of the metaverse, but they will be limited by hardware’s capabilities. We look at the state of VR hardware, the key players, and how gaming could serve as a gateway to VR/AR adoption.

Smart home device adoption could finally get boosted by a new standard. Could Matter push adoption beyond the steady growth we’re seeing?