There are tangible ways to measure success in business. Revenue goes up as share of the market increases. Business becomes healthier as you manage cash flow towards profits. And you see a surge in web traffic as you expand your digital footprint. These are all positive outcomes that can be measured in a concrete manner.

From artificial intelligence to building social communities, businesses continue to look at new tools and trends to drive growth in 2018.  More-often-than-not, however, it’s the intangibles that result from deploying new technology that have a greater impact to the bottom line – and, not all can be measured in pure dollars and cents.

Take documentation productivity tools as a prime example. With increased regulatory governance, document-intensive industries like financial services face increased requirements to produce more detailed, accurate client plans, reports, disclosures, and other documentation.

In fact, financial advisors say they can spend upwards of 24 percent of their workday on administrative tasks, like paperwork, as a result of new compliance standards. Using technology solutions like speech recognition, financial advisors can improve documentation workflows and produce tangible results, from boosting efficiency, reducing compliance risk, and improving costs.

But, it’s often the less tangibles outcomes – those that aren’t necessarily visible on the printed page – that drive a more powerful impact, such as the goodwill and longer-term relationships that result from improved client service.

Similarly, getting officers to create incident reports in a faster, more efficient way can save departments hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars. But an even more important outcome is keeping officers safer and out in the community.

When an officer can dictate a report by voice (instead of being heads down in the patrol car typing into the MDT, or mobile data terminal), he’s more situationally aware. His risk of ambush goes down because he’s alert and has his eyes on his surroundings. Also, if he’s spending less time back at the station manually typing reports, he has more time to spend in the community keeping us all safe.

It’s the impact technology has on everyday lives that has me most excited in 2018.