Welcome to the June 2023 edition of Top Conversations in Technology, where we break down which topics are leading, rising and falling each month to help technology marketers maximize relevance and adapt to changing market dynamics. In this month’s analysis, we focus on variations in news and blog citation volumes month-over-month (versus May 2023) and year-over-year (versus June 2022).

June’s Top Conversations: June is the gateway to summer, and with it comes the frenzied pre-vacation rush that leads into “summer slump” months for business. At least usually. And in Top Conversations we see that starting early this year, as if everyone just decided to invoke Alice Cooper on June 1. Or maybe journalists took early vacations to avoid their pending competition with AI “reporters.” Things that make you go hmmm.  

So here’s the data: Nine of our top 10 conversations posted volume declines from May to June, including #1 Artificial Intelligence (AI), which held on to top billing for the second month despite a marginal 3% drop in mentions. #2 Cryptocurrencies posted a slightly bigger drop (down 6%), followed by #3 Bitcoin (down 12%) and #4 Smartphone (down 13%).  

Enter the outlier: Enter the outlier: #5 Supply Chain bucked the trend, posting a small 1% gain to move up two spots as supply chain issues impacted economic outlooks, including *gasp* a global shortage of pink everything (thank you Barbie). From there, back to declines. #6 Drones dropped the most in the top 10 (down 22%), followed by #7 Blockchain (down 11%). After that, #8 Ecommerce was down 1%, #9 Cybersecurity was down 3%, and #10 Wi-Fi was down 9%. Incidentally, #11 Machine Learning was the only other top 15 topic to post a gain (up 1%), pushing it ahead of #12 Semiconductors, down 13% in the wake of its strong AI-fueled spike in May.  

What’s Climbing: June was a down month overall, with only 35% of topics (85 of 246) posting month-over-month gains. AI-related topics continued to be winners; top gains included #232 Emotional AI (up 121%), #207 Humane Technology (up 113%), #194 Cognitive Computing (up 88%) and #228 Attention Model (up 85%). All four conversations are tied to ways AI is being “humanized,” a key discussion point at President Biden’s AI summit with tech leaders in San Francisco in June. (As per pattern, lower-volume topics tend to realize greater impacts from key news or events like the Biden summit.) 

Looking at higher-volume topics, only 11 in the top 50 posted gains, and only five grew volume more than 5% over May:  

• #33 Augmented Reality – up 77%
• #23 Virtual Reality – up 54%
• #49 Application Development – up 23%
• #45 Data Security – up 14%
• #16 User Experience – up 7% 

What’s Falling: While June results reflected an early start to summer, they also reflect the power of May’s strong growth – adhering to a phenomenon we in communications research like to call “line goes up, line goes down.” Nearly two-thirds of topics posted drops (165 of 246), including all but one of the top 10. The top decliners were #246 Business Services Management (down 64%) and #244 Utility Computing (down 58%). Other standouts included topics that had sizable gains last month:  

• #190 Accelerated Computing – down 58% after May’s surge tied to Nvidia earnings  
• #100 Gig Economy – down 57% (from #71) after May’s spike due to the writers’ strike  
• #189 Mobile Security – down 54% (from #156) as interest in the Montana TikTok ban shifted to what Meta’s doing now (see gains in Augmented and Virtual Reality) 

Looking at higher-ranked topics, #50 NFT shed 28%, showing a consistent pattern with other crypto topics. #6 Drones and #18 Layoffs/Furloughs were each down 22%, followed by Digital Media (down 20%), Disinformation (down 19%) and #29 Malware (down 16%). 

So What, Now What?The incorporation of AI into, well, everything continues as we watch ebbs and flows in surrounding discussions – from April’s focus on AI and Quantum Computing, to May’s Nvidia rally, to June’s discussions about how to regulate the technology. So what’s next? July’s Screen Actors Guild strike is likely to impact our data, along with some inevitable but unnamed topic. While July and August are typically quieter months, we’ll be curious to see how the trends evolve. For now, enjoy the sunshine and lemonade, and maybe let ClippyGPT answer your emails.

Questions? Comments? See a topic we are not tracking? Please share below, and we will address in future installments.