Top 10 most influential technology companies in the world

After a tumultuous 2021, businesses reflect on a world ravaged by the pandemic. Those who made gains adapted fast through technology, that has enabled an accelerated digital transformation to provide green shoots of recovery and prosperity for those on this list.

Hybrid working — so long frowned upon by so many — proved to be highly critical to keeping up productivity. This resulted in questions being asked over the need for so much office real estate too, as Microsoft reported that 70% of workers wanted hybrid working to stay.  

With so many confined to their homes, the huge surge in web traffic through ecommerce gave rise to many unicorns (the London Stock Exchange reported a record year for IPOs, raising £16.8bn) and some  of the main online players such as Amazon benefited hugely from marketplace fees.  

Hyperscalers also used the extraordinary circumstances that gripped consumers and businesses to put cloud technology at the forefront of digital transformation strategy, as the need for handling data capacity grew and stakes were raised from the clandestine threat of cybersecurity. 

But it is in the emergent power of augmented reality, artificial intelligence and automation that we see the widest impact. It’s through these tools that our  customer experience will reach new levels, sustainability goals can be reached and intelligence can create operational efficiencies at scale. 

We look at ten of the most influential technology companies by the measure of their global impact.