Tomorrow's tech.

Compared with even a decade ago, the technologies that have become routine in corporate life today are pretty amazing. But, to be sure, they're nothing compared with tomorrow. Even as we marvel over today's miraculous gadgets and gizmos, men and women are working in laboratories round the clock on the next generation - and the generation to follow - of astounding new devices, applications, and protocols. Computer walls that can understand hand gestures; cars that read your e-mail aloud; sunglasses that double as cell phones. Not all will make it into the office, but those that do have the potential to forever alter the business landscape. We checked in with three of the nation's most advanced tech laboratories to find out which emerging technologies will take us through the next decade - and beyond.

Caroline Kovac, vice president, technical strategy and worldwide operations, IBM Research 

While concepts like knowledge management and data warehousing have only recently become buzz phrases, IBM Research technicians are developing applications that will make them commonplace. Specifically, they're poring over sophisticated mathematical and algorithmic techniques to find highly advanced and customized behavior patterns in a company's raw data. Similar kinds of applications will be available for business intelligence and optimizing supply and demand chains. "We're looking at the application of more agent-based techniques for knowledge management, where you're not just crunching numbers but you're also better able to manage the information by automatically categorizing and analyzing text-based documents across the enterprise," says vp Caroline Kovac, who estimates that kind of thematic analysis being available in the five-to-seven-year time frame.

The IBM lab is also working on integrating natural language speech into PCs, eliminating the need for keyboards, mouses - and much of the complexity that accompanies the navigation of those testy machines. This technology will be useful for any device that might even potentially contain a tiny computer. Longer term, also about five to seven years out, the object will be to get computers not only to recognize words, but understand the context and meaning of speech, says Kovac. "So you can talk to computers in your own words, without a specific command, and it will understand."

Further down the road, gestural understanding will be introduced into the corporate environment. This would allow turning one entire portion of a wall, for example, into a computer that would understand hand gestures as well as speech. "So you can point to a spot on the wall and say, 'put a circle there,' and up will pop a circle." The potential applications for business, says Kovac, are limited only by the CEO's imagination.

Michael Dertouzos, director, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science

Natural speech understanding is also a primary focus at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, according to director Michael Dertouzos. "It's clearly the biggest kid on the block in terms of lowering cost and increasing capability," he says. Speech recognition will enable more humane automated phone communication with customers, who will be able to ask for departments and individuals by name rather than punching in extension numbers on a keypad.

The technology will have a plethora of internal corporate uses, including allowing executives to dictate notes to their computers, which would then immediately transcribe and file them. Sound like an awfully expensive replacement for your executive assistant? Not according to Moore's law. In five to six years, the speech technology that MIT has already spent more than $30 million developing will be readily available for business use for only a few hundred dollars, including hardware, says Dertouzos.

The lab is also working on developing computer languages and protocols for "tomorrow's Web." The successful companies will be those that offload as much work as possible to computers and utilize proximity to make long-distance connectivity more seamless. In 10 years, for example, Dertouzos envisions a customer sitting at home in Tokyo at a PC viewing the latest designs from a shoe manufacturer in Italy and discussing them with a salesperson in New Hampshire. The manufacturer will already have the customer's precise foot measurements, so shoes will be made to order. "Digital technologies make it possible to do all the design and the necessary thinking, and it would actually be cheaper," he says.

But, in preparing for the next generation of digital and speech technology, Dertouzos offers just a word of warning to CEOs: The human element will still be a fundamental tool. "If you don't integrate these technologies with the human beings at your company, you're dead."

Ron Brachman, research vice president, information systems and services, AT&T Laboratories

Clearly, if business is going to be conducted regularly via data connections - and if more information is going to be passed digitally - then the bandwidth problem will have to be resolved. Today, the Web is too often referred to as the "World Wide Wait." But fortunately, it's an issue to which the folks at AT&T Labs are devoting much of their time and energy.

Specifically, says research vp Ron Brachman, technicians are developing compression technology and reservation protocols designed to allow voice, data, and video to pass smoothly through a single data line packet. So imagine a customer viewing three-dimensional images of your company's products on-line while having a voice and video conversation with the salesperson-over a single standard telephone line. And internally, the development of this new technology would mean you could have a three- or four-way video and voice conference while simultaneously transferring documents, graphs, and other materials back and forth.

The capability to have conferences remotely with multiple participants will be enhanced further by three-dimensional technology, creating much advanced variations of the "chat rooms" that have become so popular among on-line consumers. "So you could create a 3-D board room and invite anyone in, and they can come in looking like themselves," says Brachman.

But the advances in compression technology will do more than just add functionality in the work place; it will likely cause a shift to a new corporate culture, an "always-on" mentality, because individuals will have the ability to be constantly plugged in. "The change is that you begin to feel like this thing on your desk is a portal to the world as opposed to a super-duper calculator that works in isolation," says Brachman, adding: "It's hard to predict the impacts of that change." But, he says, one thing is certain: It's gonna be big.