Kevin Benedict is a TCS futurist and lecturer focused on the signals and foresight that emerge as society, geopolitics, economies, science, technology, environment, and philosophy converge.
I am excited to share an interview I recorded with Oracle’s digital, AI, chatbot and mobility expert Suhas Uliyar. In this interview we discuss the meaning of ambient human interfaces, the technology stack that enables chatbots, the power of interfaces that you don’t have to learn, and we learn that algorithms haven’t change that much in 25 years. I learned a lot and hope you will to! Enjoy!
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
Have any of you spent time considering how digital transformation, artificial intelligence, IoT, mobility and virtual and augmented reality are impacted by computer memory? Me neither until this week at GSMA's Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona. I had the privilege of interviewing Micron Technologies' Gino Skulick, II and getting educated on it. Very cool information!!!
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
Presidents are powerful people facing and dealing with complex nation, market and economy sized problems. Making good decisions and managing these deeply complex systems and organizations requires massive amounts of data, analysis, experience and understanding. They must process and analyze millions of data inputs, and have a clear understanding of what the data in aggregate means, and then have an understanding of how they can influence the outcomes by pulling the right levers of power and influence to achieve their goals.
The responsibility of dealing with these massive levels of complexity seems almost inhumane. In fact, so inhumane, perhaps it would be better to not have a human, but a bot as President. Bots are designed and programmed to react in a prescribed way to data inputs. Data is fed into the artificial intelligence (AI) system within the bot, and the bot responds and takes actions as programmed. Add machine and deep learning, and the bot can learn and make decisions faster and better every nanosecond. The more data that it can access and analyze, the more accurately it can predict how pulling the levers of power and influence can change outcomes to achieve a given goal.
With a bot, the voters would vote on their preferred outcome and goals, and the associated algorithm, rather than on a personality, promise or televised debate result. If you want more jobs, a better economy, more security and peace, then vote on the particular algorithm that would give you the predictable outcome of your choice. The algorithm in the bot would take the millions of data inputs and use them to pull the levers of power and influence that deliver you, the voters’, mandate.
A bot’s administration and cabinet would be a celebration of nerds and data scientists (perhaps redundant) - responsible for finding all the possible data inputs needed to be analyzed to make the best decisions, improving deep learning systems to find patterns and hidden meaning, and identifying the appropriate levers of power and influence that could be integrated with the bot to deliver the voters’ mandate.
With a bot in office, public debates could focus on what our dreams and aspirations are for our society. Many of which are widely shared. A prosperous world that honors and supports our elders, invests in the best education, health, safety, peace, respect and renewable energies for all of us. Who doesn’t want that? We could dedicate our time to debating how best to collect the right data, improve the accuracy of data, ensure the right data is being analyzed, understanding what the data means, and then accurately identifying emerging levers of power and influence.
With a bot as President, Sunday morning news programs could spend their time debating algorithms and comparing the outcomes based on game theory and actual data results on sexy business analytic dashboards.
If you are up for a data-driven decision-making world, then Bots for President 2020!
Watch my latest 3-minute video on digital technology trends:
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
Change is hard, and many of us procrastinate, make excuses or lag behind. Today, we simply can’t. Digital technologies are no longer “nice-to-have” tools of the business – today they are the business. Digital laggards are already finding their markets disrupted and their abilities to compete overturned. As they desperately try to outrun the Darwinian effect of their slow responses, they are faced with not one but three periods – or ages – of digital transformation to navigate – disruptive transformation, hyper-digital transformation and ubiquitous transformation. Understanding these three ages, and when they will emerge, is critical for business success.
Some may argue digital transformation started 70 years ago with ENIAC, the first commercially available computer, while others argue it started with the Internet. Whenever the starting point actually was, we can all agree that the proliferation of digital over the last five years has brought unprecedented personal and business disruption.
The age of disruptive transformation introduced eight specific technologies that disrupted traditional business operations and IT infrastructures, and are having a “large to very large” business impact on at least one-quarter of the digital leaders in our survey:
Cybersecurity (59%)
Big data/business analytics (54%)
Mobile technologies (40%)
Cloud computing (32%)
Social media (31%)
Collaboration technologies (26%)
IoT/sensors (26%)
Biotechnology (25%)
These eight technologies are data-centric – they are all about producing, managing, analyzing, securing and storing data in new and innovative ways, and then acting on it. With the exception of biotechnology, these digital technologies are critical components of OILS, and profoundly impact business strategies, business processes and human interactions.
These digital technologies – which should already be implemented and scaling to have an impact on your organization – now serve as the foundation for the next two periods of digital transformation. If these top eight digital technologies are not already in place within your IT infrastructure, the current age of hyper-digital transformation will threaten your company’s very existence.
During the second period of digital-related change – the age of hyper-digital transformation – the pace of change and the business impact of digital technologies greatly accelerate. The eight top technologies from the previous era will rapidly increase their business impact by an average of 74% among digital leaders by 2020. This increase is a sign of the enormity of the forces at work, the size of investments needed, and the cadence at which organizations need to adapt to stay relevant and competitive.
In the age of hyper-digital transformation, nine additional, incremental digital technologies join the eight from the previous age. These nine start with a relatively low level of importance today but increase by an average of 145% among digital leaders by the year 2020. These nine additional digital technologies reach the threshold of having an “important to very important” business impact among at least one-fourth of digital leaders:
Telepresence (Skype, Google Hangouts, etc.) (49%)
Digital currency (49%)
Artificial intelligence (46%)
Robotic process automation (software) (41%)
Sharing economy platforms like Uber (39%)
Nanotechnologies (35%)
Robots (hardware) (33%)
Telematics (29%)
Wearables (28%)
When combined, these seventeen digital technologies increase their business impact among digital leaders by an average of 112% between 2016 and 2020. The predicted business impact of these digital technologies mean that the business and IT organizations you operate today will need to look very different by 2020 in order to keep up and compete successfully.
Retail is considered a canary in the coalmine for many other industries. As such, when retail giants begin to fail, it is important to pay attention and heed the warning signs. Retail giant Sports Authority led for bankruptcy in March 2016, and according to many analysts, this was due in large part to the company’s slow response to online and mobile competition. In May 2016, Aeropostale led for bankruptcy, and according to analysts, it couldn’t keep up with fast-changing consumer behaviors and the speed of emerging fashion trends at the same rate as their online competitors. Also in May2016, the UK-based BHS entered administration (i.e., led for bankruptcy), and according to reports, the company had fallen far behind its digital competitors and fast-changing consumer trends.
The consensus among retail analysts is these companies failed to digitally transform quickly enough, which resulted in lost ground to more tech-savvy competitors.
In the final period of the digital transformation trilogy – the age of ubiquitous transformation in the year 2025 – our research finds the business impact of the previous age slowing as companies work to digest the incredible change of the two previous ages. However, even in this more pedestrian age, respondents expect an impressive 35% increase in the business impact of digital technologies.
In this era, six new technologies mature and join the previous seventeen, all of which are now having a “large to very large” business impact on the organizations at the forefront of digital change:
Blockchain (43%)
Geospatial information systems (41%)
3-D printing (40%)
Virtual reality (39%)
Autonomous self-driving cars (34%)
Drones (33%).
Among digital leaders, these six digital technologies are expected to increase their business impact an average of 96% between 2020 and 2025.
These six additional data-driven technologies are at once foundational and revolutionary. They highlight dramatic changes to come in industries such as transportation, banking, finance and commerce and manufacturing, all made possible by the digital transformations that preceded them.
Timing is everything, and the correct sequencing of technology implementation and budgeting, from proof of concept through implementation of production-ready systems, is critical. Our list of 23 digital technologies, their maturity timeframes and projected business impact (posited by our respondents) are powerful tools to plan your organization’s digital transformation strategy.
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
In a world that operates on billions of digits every day, humans are too slow and inattentive. To adapt, we must automate the processing of millions of complex transactions on a daily basis, at speeds fast enough to satisfy impatient digital users. This adaptation requires a massive level of digital transformation that can support operations, business processes and decision-making speeds faster than is humanly possible.
Historically, digital technologies get faster, cheaper, more powerful and smaller every couple of years. We humans, however, don’t. We operate in human time, a biological cadence influenced by the physical environment, our well-documented physical, mental and emotional limitations, and the universe that we live in. As digital interactions proliferate, so also does the volume of real-time data and required analysis. Most people are already at their limit of coping with the deluge of data, so we must now digitally augment our capabilities to handle the massive increases in the volume, speed and the complexity of it. These augmentations will involve OILS (optimized information logistics systems), supported by artificial intelligence (AI) and software for process automation.
Software robots (or “bots”) can be developed to analyze vast quantities of data without getting bored, make decisions based on codified decision trees that humans design, and then act in milliseconds. In our research, 18% of digital leaders report intelligent process automation via bots is already having a large to very large impact on their businesses, however, it jumps to 41% by 2020. This represents a dramatic increase of 128% in just 40 months.
We – humans – already at our limit, must find a way to digitally augment our capabilities to handle the massive increases in the volume, speed and the complexity of data with bots.
Slow service annoys us. We are immediately frustrated with people and brands incapable of supporting our digital habits and expectations. To achieve a real-time operational tempo, companies must evolve from "human time" to "digital time." When enterprises can support digital time, they can close process loops faster, harness immediate feedback on what’s happening within the process itself, and act on those insights nearly instantaneously. The result: smarter decisions that enable businesses to operate like never before.
One of the biggest challenges enterprises face today in designing, developing and deploying OILS is upgrading core IT systems that frequently comprise of legacy systems incapable of supporting digital time. Though this is hard work, it is the key to winning.
Our research clearly shows widespread consensus that AI is one of the most important emerging technologies that will help overcome many of these technology and human limitations. Our survey respondents predict AI will be the top digital technology, with the largest impact on their work, by 2020. Currently, only 15% of the respondents think AI is having a large impact on their business. In the next 40 months, however, 46% believe AI will be critical – that’s a 207% increase in pro-AI sentiment.
Digital interactions are often supported by AI systems dependent on real-time analytics to provide contextually relevant and personalized experiences. In addition, as the number of mobile and connected devices with billions of connected sensors increases, so also does the associated data in the ether that needs to be analyzed and turned into actionable intelligence that can be used by AI systems to deliver real-time business value. No wonder, then, that executives in our research forecast big data/business analytics will have the biggest impact of all technologies between the years 2020-2025.
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
Presenting 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation in Lisbon, PT
Digital transformation initiatives both increase revenue and decrease expenses according to our upcoming study titled Work AHEAD 2016 by Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. For this study we surveyed over 2,000 executives across 18 countries. The expected net business impact over the next 3 years of rapid digital transformation, i.e. hyper-transformation, is an increase in revenue of 11.4% (Revenue = 10.3%, Costs = -1.3%) amongst the companies in our study. These numbers represent the difference between success and failure in many industries.
To get the predicted revenue impact, companies expect to increase their spending on digital technologies from 11.3% of their revenue today, to 16.6% of revenue by 2020, while decreasing their non-digital investments.
In addition, our study reveals 64% of the futurists in our study, experts paid to study digital technology trends and to develop future strategies, believe digital transformation will boost revenues by 2020, 76% believe it will strengthen their competitive positioning, and 88% believe it will accelerate their speed to market. If you accept these predictions, then your organization should quickly transform itself and jettison the heavy baggage that accumulates as a result of decades of institutionalized methodologies developed and codified in an analog era - an era operating at a far slower operational tempo. The good news is that ROIs (return on investments) from digital transformation initiatives are compelling. Nearly 30% of the surveyed firms are receiving an ROI greater than 100%.
These revenue numbers have investors interested and asking about the digital transformation plans of companies they invest in, or are considering investing in today. We have all read about the list of companies that have failed this year due in part to their slow and/or inadequate response to digital technologies and changing competitive marketplaces. As a result investors today want to understand the speed and scale of their portfolio’s digital transformation initiatives, as these initiatives can be predictors of future value.
For executives, transforming an enterprise is difficult at any time, but when an enterprise is highly profitable - digital transformation is even harder. Why? The temptation to follow the maxim, “Don’t fix what isn’t broken,” is just too compelling. The challenge enterprises are faced with today, however, is that digital technologies are changing the competitive landscape faster and in different ways than executives have ever seen before.
Recently, we presented a workshop on digital transformation strategies to a highly profitable automotive parts and systems manufacturer. The company is filled with smart people using efficient long standing manufacturing systems and processes. The company is innovative in R&D, and forward thinking in the adoption of digital technologies and strategies for their products and services.
The challenge we all faced in the room is how do we justify digital transformation investments, when today the old systems and ways of thinking pay out in record profits? How do we articulate that sensors, artificial intelligence, digital platforms and real-time data are taking on a whole new level of importance? In fact, executives believe big data and business analytics will have the biggest business impact of all technologies on businesses from years 2020-2025.
We were able to demonstrate, through an intensive brainstorming workshop, how a sensor enabled digital platform connected to their physical parts and equipment, and integrated with external databases could provide enormous customer and business value. We were able to show them how their current list of physical products and services, could be expanded by adding a whole new list of new digital products and services on top of their current offerings. The data they had access to in their physical products and solutions was unique and could offer significant value and competitive advantages if they made it available on a digital platform as a service. Our mission was accomplished.
Today an enterprise’s system for collecting, analyzing, reporting and sharing data is mission critical, especially given the increasing importance of artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and machine learning to companies’ future success. The end-to-end system for managing this data we call the “optimized information logistics systems” or by its acronym, OILS. Having effective OILS is mandatory in order to become a digitally transformed enterprise (DTE). Digitally transformed enterprises place a premium on data collecting, analysis, situational awareness and real-time action and reaction. Executives see the value in OILS, as 63% believe analytics will have a very strong impact on work by 2020, and 62% predict OILS will significantly enhance decision-making over the next 5 years.
DTEs see where their resources are located, where they are needed and how best to manage them at all times to successfully and efficiently accomplish their mission. They see how customers are using their products and how they are holding up. Real-time connectivity combined with OILS enables organizations to think, act and compete in real-time, a capability never before possible. It enables products in the field to be intimately tied to R&D and the manufacturing floor. It is a whole new world, which in spite of profits today, must be anticipated and invested in for tomorrow, or the profits of today might lead to the death of them tomorrow.
Authors: Tim Hillison, Senior Director, Cognizant Digital Works, and Kevin Benedict, Senior Analyst, Cognizant's Center for the Future of Work
*Source The Work Ahead, 2016, Cognizant Center for the Future of Work
Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
