There is only one thing that is inevitable and constant—and that is change. We live in an age where technology is transforming enterprises, societies, and everything in between. In the past decade, digital transformation has gained significance in every industry and enterprises everywhere strive to digitise their core processes to perform better in a dynamic business environment.

From the Cloud and artificial intelligence to Blockchain and Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT), digital technologies are redefining how we live and work. They are expanding the purview of the potential in terms of new products, services, business models, and the internal processes that facilitate these new offerings.

I am a believer of life-lessons, and my tenure with Indian Army has offered immense learning in navigating through challenges. One of those has been preparing for contingencies while strategising the operations. It is very similar and relevant in today's environment as well. The past year brought to light this change more than ever with businesses propelling digital transformation to the top of the priority list as a long-term investment. It has become imperative for businesses to adapt and act fast—pivoting processes and operations to survive and build resilience for a sustainable future ahead. The only way forward is how well humans and machines harmonise with each other to propagate more innovative, agile, and adaptable economies and enterprises.

Today, enterprises must reimagine their future and get on board intelligent digital re-engineering. Each of the factors that facilitate and empower the re-engineering journey must be observed and integrated to create a workforce of the future.

The Future of Consumer Technology

The future of the human-technology interface is reliant on the fact that every business—whether it is hospitality, education, logistics, food & beverage, personal care, and myriad others—is a technology business. Digital touchpoints are being inserted at every step of the customer journey from awareness to realisation to advocacy. Interactive kiosks, radio-frequency identification tags, virtual reality simulations, and computer vision are examples of how immersive human-technology interactions are in business-to-customer (B2C) models. However, the distant digital brand experience will not continue to be the only norm. In the next 18 to 24 months, we will witness in-person and digital experiences to be more intertwined than ever before. Customer journeys will constitute offline transactions with integrated digital elements to elevate brand experience and hyper-personalisation. A more digital world, therefore, must be coupled with a more connected and networked society.

Cloud Has Become the Cornerstone of Agility

From a business point-of-view, businesses need to focus on ‘total experience’ and ‘internet of behaviours’. The total experience is aligning technology with all stakeholders; customers, employees, and suppliers to build intelligent enterprises—thus, solving complex business problems through optimised human experiences. Cloud computing provides the foundation for enterprises to be intelligent, to retrieve data from all back and front operating systems and then generate predictive analytics and effective decision making. The data looks at business transactions to understand what is happening and helps us to know why something is happening by capturing human sentiment. 2021 and onwards is going to witness modernising legacy systems and migrating them to the Cloud to unleash organisations’ digital potency. Gaining real-time insights on equipment to reduce maintenance costs, using IoT and predictive analysis to recognise weather patterns and minimise energy costs, AI in the deployment of bots that understand humans or proactively supporting healthcare through tele-health applications are examples of how businesses and Cloud technologies will continue to evolve and innovate together.

Rise of the Intelligent Enterprise 

An intelligent enterprise can adapt and fundamentally re-assemble itself based on a current and future situation. As organisations accelerate business strategy to drive faster digital transformation, they need to be agile and make quick business decisions based on intelligence from the available data.

An intelligent enterprise can run integrated processes across every part of the business to make informed decisions, automate processes and deliver the experiences that customers and employees expect. Having an open business technology platform to embed analytics and support data management and integration is vital for business operations to run smoothly. The case for becoming an intelligent enterprise has never been stronger. The supply chain shocks and dislocations caused by the pandemic showed us that it is not enough for businesses to be internally intelligent. Companies must be able to listen, understand and act on signals from outside their four walls. Businesses need to be able to operate in a network economy. By connecting to other organisations within their value chain, where they can exchange data, collaborate on business processes, and transact more seamlessly with one another.

What Lies Ahead

In a world of seemingly infinite unknowns, enterprises are establishing programs that can effectively identify, evaluate, and incubate digitisation to transform themselves. By doing so, they are also creating new opportunities and harnessing advanced technologies to chart a path to the next horizon.

The future will not just be about technology. It will come with the incubation of technology, purpose and balance that drives people growth and business strategies. Business leaders are placing big bets on intelligent environments and bringing a whole new level of sophistication to the physical world. Hence, it is imperative to go beyond the hype of new technologies and discover how they are shaping our future.