Charlie Brooker’s hit show Black Mirror tells mostly dystopian stories of how technology can run amuck and seriously mess up our lives.

However, not every episode is necessarily negative. For instance, a happy ending of sorts was possible in the recent choose-your-own-adventure style episode Bandersnatch and back in Season 3, an episode called San Junipero explored the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in elderly and palliative care.

Making technology predictions is never easy, but Ooyala's GM of Asia Pacific and Japan, Steve Davis says Virtual Reality's (VR) big break is likely to take place at this month's Winter Olympics. 

"2018 should be the beginning of the real acceptance of VR and AR," Davis told a press lunch in Sydney attended by Fifth Quadrant. "My prediction, along with the company's, is that we will see the very first huge worldwide event about to happen in a couple of weeks – Virtual Reality at the Winter Olympics." 

With 2018 well and truly upon us, it's time to reflect on the year past and ponder the year ahead.

Last February, Fifth Quadrant reached out to some of Australia's customer experience (CX) Thought Leaders to find out where they believed CX would head in 2017. Fifth Quadrant spoke with experts from Microsoft, LogMeIn, Oracle, Verint and Flamingo who predicted that 2017 would see the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, bots, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) in CX.

We reached out to: Microsoft, LogMeIn, Oracle, Verint and Flamingo - Here's what the CX experts had to say.

Each year our team of customer experience (CX) experts look to the future and make their predictions on how they see CX evolving. Attempting to peer into long-term technological and economic development is often a futile exercise considering the sheer amount of disruption various industries have gone through in the last decade, so we’ve generally found looking at the next couple of years is a bit more reasonable. Surely even Nostradamus today would find the changing tech world a serious hindrance to his ability to effectively predict the future.

My coworkers have lost their minds. As I entered the elevator yesterday morning after having picked up my morning Sumatran brew from the cafe on the first floor, a young businessman quickly hopped in the lift behind three of us who had already taken up residency each of us gripping our choice of morning medicine from the cafe.