If you are wondering what the biggest business stories in the tech world will be next year, forget driverless cars, augmented reality goggles and computers that respond to the human voice.

Those inventions generate eye-catching headlines, but the main engines of growth for the biggest tech companies in 2018 are ones that have already become a deeply ingrained part of business life: digital advertising, ecommerce and the wholesale move of global IT to the cloud.

It is always dangerous to put too much faith in extrapolation, but some trends in digitisation are hard to ignore. They are driven by the emergence of a pervasive technology infrastructure and a preference among users for the convenience of digital services. They also reflect the willingness of more businesses to operate on platforms built by companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon — as well as China’s emerging tech giants Alibaba and Tencent.