The tides of revolution are shifting, the winds of change are blowing and the volcanos of disruption are erupting. Tech, politics, and click-bait gurus across the world are making their predictions for 2017, some with a little more ambition than others.

Of course, after a rocky 2016, there’s no way to tell what will be going on by the end of this year, but there definitely seems to be an appetite for trying.

While our own Kit Smith looked into his crystal ball to produce predictions for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for the coming year, the Brandwatch React team decided to take a less targeted approach and consult the internet on what 2017 will look like using social data.

Collective future telling

The team used Brandwatch Analytics to scan over 80 million websites for the term “2017 will be the year of __” between December 1st and 29th 2016, finding thousands of mentions.

We then downloaded the mentions and identified the most common words immediately following the phrase.

We excluded retweets to try to get an idea of what individuals are thinking, as well as phrases that were repeated hundreds of times that promoted products (spam).

This is what we found.

Predictions for 2017

Fairly obvious were the number of marketing buzz words, but there were a fair few anomalies. For each keyword pulled from the data we explored the mentions behind its prominence.

2017 will be the year of intelligence

We’re kicking off with a vague one, but once you dive into the data a little the word intelligence is used in a number of ways.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and chat bots are huge talking points within the “intelligence” conversation. 2016 may have been a year where these words came into common parlance but it seems we’re now expecting them to become far more visible in our daily lives.

2017 will be the year of blockchain

Blockchain technology could be taking off in a far greater way in 2017. Blockchain is a way to structure data that creates a far more secure and fast way for transactions of currency like bitcoin to take place, with potentially revolutionary consequences for the FinTech world (another key word in the conversation) and the way we each do business.

You can find out more about blockchain and it’s potential here.