Decode It Right

Digital transformation is a must for most businesses and so is ensuring that the last man in the link also buys in the vision for it to succeed.

- Dr Abhishek Narain Singh

According to Accenture’s Digital Economic Value Index, 25 per cent of the world economy will be digital by 2020, which was 22 per cent in 2015, and accounted for 15 per cent in 2005. In a similar vein, according to a joint study conducted by Microsoft and IDC, impact on the combined GDP of AsiaPacific derived from digital products or services (created through the use of digital technologies) will reach to 60 per cent in the year 2021 as compared to 6 per cent in 2017. For 2019, the forecast is 25 per cent. These estimates are enough to give a hint of the pace of digital transformation and its impact on economies, businesses, and end users. As Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft says, “Every company is a software company. You have to start thinking and operating like a digital company. It’s no longer just about procuring one solution and deploying one… It’s really you yourself thinking of your own future as a digital company.”

The pace at which technology is changing, it is nearly impossible for anyone to foresee how the next decade will look like. The rate at which automation is reshaping office and work environment across industry—credit goes to machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive modeling, deep learning, and many such other technologies—it is hard to predict which job will stay and which will be replaced by bots. Banking and financial sector, aviation industry, warehousing, and logistics and transportation systems are few examples of this. It is not very far that we will see the self-driving cars on roads, human-less retail stores, delivery through drones, and 3D printed objects in households as a common phenomenon in our vicinity. The question is who will survive and lead this digital wave.

Predicting the unpredictable