When it comes to 7-Figure Small businesses, it's all about the creative, empathetic human at the center of it all.But it's the tools that truly allow us to augment ourselves to build powerful businesses without investors or employees. In the next few years, technology is going to change things for small business owners at an astonishing rate.Yes, we've been hearing about tech such as artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and the internet of things (IoT) for a while now. But it's not really the individual fields that will sneak up on us -- it's the creative convergence of multiple new technologies that quickly change what "best practices" will look like.In today's episode, Jerod and I discuss a few of these trends and how they'll interrelate to impact your business:1. The Privacy Trade-offOutside of the human element, marketing for a 7-Figure Small business is powered by data, scaled by automation, and optimized by analytics. But at what point are we going too far when it comes to the privacy of our prospects?A majority of consumers are willing to trade personal data in exchange for personalized and targeted content, products, and other offers. But the moment you go beyond offering more value and cross the line into creepy, you can lose the trust of your audience.2. The Impact of 5GYou've no doubt heard plenty about 5G -- the fifth generation wireless technology for digital cellular networks that began wide deployment in 2019 and will become mainstream this year.5G brings three new aspects to the table: bigger channels (to speed up data), lower latency (to be more responsive), and the ability to connect a lot more devices at once (for sensors and smart devices). What that means to you as a marketer and business owner may be more than you think.3. Marketing Technology Meets AIOne thing we've discussed on several occasions is what will happen when various forms of artificial intelligence is baked into your marketing software, such as tools for email, automation, and landing pages.We discuss the move to add AI into the landing page and testing platform from Unbounce. This solution is likely more expensive than we'd like, but the point is that soon this will be in all levels of marketing technology, just like automation was once expensive and is now a feature of every email marketing software.