Technology Timeline FAQs

The Technology Timeline provides a view of future opportunities driven by 16 groups of technologies.


How do I interpret the Technology Timeline chart?

The Technology Timeline provides a view of the 16 groups of technologies (based on Faethm’s Technology Taxonomy) and the opportunity and impacts these will drive 15 years into the future. Each curve represents a projection of the extent to which one of the technologies will impact FTE tasks (and hence jobs and related salary costs) over time.

The chart can be filtered to curate a future view of either automation or augmentation opportunities. Technologies are ordered from most to least impacting. The colour distinguishes the different technologies. The tooltips can be clicked on for further detail.

How do I apply the insights from this chart?

Use these insights to inform your technology adoption strategy and timeline, and ensure your technology investments are made at the right time. For example, it may be wise to hold off investment in one technology if more advanced technology is likely to have a greater impact in the near future. 

How are the Technology Timeline predictions made?

The chart aggregates all job predictions across the organisation, displaying total impact proportionally by impacting technology. The volume of each technology curve is represented as a budget figure, which is the cumulative salary cost across the workforce.

Faethm's occupation ontology lists over 5,000 jobs. Each job is comprised of a unique combination of work tasks from our set of over 26,000 tasks. Each work task encompasses a range of human abilities required to complete each task. And each of those tasks can be either automated or augmented by technology in Faethm's technology taxonomy. 

Each technology and task combination in our model has a unique adoption curve that shows the advancement of technology over time. The adoption curve illustrates the likely adoption rate of technology, given the country and industry ability or propensity to adopt technology over the next 15 years.

Each curve is combined with the SVM predictions to create a probabilistic model describing the likelihood of adoption of automating and augmenting technology over the next 15 years. The curves are regularly updated to reflect the most current technology adoption rates and advancements.

What is the Faethm Technology Taxonomy?

Faethm's Technology Taxonomy is a human-centred classification of technology. We first identified human abilities required for work and used these to construct a MECE grouping of technologies that could disrupt or enhance one or more of these abilities. Each of the 16 technology classes represent the types of technologies that directly impact work and which are either available now or will be within the next 15 years.

Outside of the taxonomy are what we term infrastructure technologies. These are enabling technologies such as IoT or cloud computing, or industry-disrupting technologies such as nano-tech or 3D-printing. We see these technologies as indirectly impacting work and are therefore not present in our task-based modelling.