Are Disruptive Technologies A Good Strategy? Or Is It Just A Solution?
With the world going highly digital, and technology playing the lead role, the question of the hour is whether disruptive technologies are actually a good solution a few years down the line?
Technology, or tech as people love to call it has been taking the center stage in the success of companies these days. Consider the examples of Uber, Amazon, and London based Deliveroo. These companies have changed the way we live, shop, work and consume content. This ensures faster and varied innovation, faster than before.
Since there have been several predictions about economic uncertainty, it’s vital that businesses deploy cutting-edge technology in order to maintain competitiveness. Experts have predicted that by the upcoming years, board-level conversations would be dominated by ways that would ensure seamless customer experience, formulating tactics, and also embrace disruptive technologies.
Cultural Shift Over The Years
With the advancement of disruptive technology, consumers can book meals, cabs at the click of a mouse, without even leaving their rooms. Consumers expect services like ‘Apple Easy’ and ‘Google Fast’ in different aspects of their lives, demanding quick and seamless experiences always. It’s expected that Customer experience management will continue to drive success in all sectors this year.
It might mean that a lot of organisations, would have to go back to the drawing board and start incorporating customer-centricity into their business models. Truly speaking, as and when the e-commerce market becomes saturated, customer experience would be the central factor that would help incumbent brands cut through the noise in the market.
Experience Management normally extends much beyond the end user to include other important stakeholders like that of the suppliers, partners, and employees. In the upcoming year, companies would be increasingly acknowledging the need for a close link between good employee experience and exceptional customer service. For instance, there might be days when a data scientist would choose to work in Silicon Valley, not only to reap the financial benefits, but to be acquainted with an innovative culture. Companies must also make an effort to emulate this culture and provide similar opportunities for their employees.
Is Disruptive Technologies A Good Solution?
With the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the global business, days ahead might be quite a tech enabled. As per a report by PwC, AI’s potential contribution to the global economy could reach $15.7 trillion by 2030. Also, the market for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is likely to grow exponentially in 2020, since use cases for the technology would continue to emerge across sectors. The days ahead would see an increase in the commercialisation of IoT data, thus sparking the data economy for IIoT. It is likely that over the next year, IIoT platform services will continue to turn to public cloud providers. Supply chain can also use the data collected from IoT, from research and development to suppliers providing goods, through various stages of manufacturing.
However, truly speaking, the business world has already begun harnessing these technologies. According to research from Celonis, around 45 percent of C-suite executives don’t know where to start when developing their transformation strategy. Around 82 percent of business leaders admit that they don’t really look at their internal processes to establish priorities before starting a transformation initiative. Mostly, it is seen that businesses that rush to deploy technologies without digging deeper, find their strategies falling. Rather than this, in order to achieve success, organisations need to look at the underlying inefficiencies within the process.
What Does The Future Hold?
It is expected that the workplaces in 2020 will see ‘augmented collaboration’ with humans and robots working together side by side. This combination of humans and robots is already visible in corporations like Amazon and Google. However, people have been working collaboratively with laptops and mobiles for years. However, with the advent of human-machine convergence, things are going to become much lucrative. Beginning with advanced robotic technology, starting from ‘smart glasses’ to intelligent assistants. Also, autonomous machines would be capable of taking on and completing more tasks, thus enabling humans to focus on value add work.
Also, companies would get to prepare their employees for this shift, as Gen Z starts to enter the workforce. While they would have a unique set of demands and expectations, the new generation’s life experiences affect the types of jobs they seek and define what’s more important to them.
At a time when so many changes have been coming so fast, it can be a little hard to grasp the sheer scale of technology innovation underway. Any which ways, 2020 will be an interesting year for major organisations across all sectors, as companies focus on adopting disruptive technologies and also ensuring a holistic experience for customers, and preparing for the workplace of the future.
