During the 'TM One 2021 Leap Summit', we invited the founder of forecasting lab Futurescape248 and futurist for leading conversations around human-centred innovations, Shivvy Jervis as a keynote speaker.
Here are the 4 major key takeaways from her presentation:
Shivvy Jervis highlighted that 60-70% of digital transformation programs fail. Therefore, it becomes necessary to understand the factors that can help implement a successful human-centred business.
To achieve digitalisation, the organisation must go beyond just relying on the tech team. Going digital is beyond an IT challenge; organisations looking to adopt it must bring leadership from different business lines together. This will enable the technical leadership to understand the bigger agenda of the organisation. Also, the people implementing it must feel equipped with all the resources required to deal with those digital developments.
Secondly, organisations should invest in upskilling people. It must focus on finding the right talent capable of scaling the digitalisation.
The moral economy, as the name suggests, is all about an organisation’s morals, ethics and code of conduct towards its employees and communities in which they operate and society at large. Organisations acknowledging all their stakeholders have a better success rate as they do not miss on reassessing the values they stand for, particularly generations that make up the current talent. They also tend to attract top talent compared to their competitors.
Jervis advised, key decision-makers to consider looking at a non-linear timeline. Having a non-linear timeline allows you to plot the short and long term in parallel. It allows you to factor in multiple variables during the digital transformation, enabling you to predict and anticipate future scenarios.
Giving social intelligence to code simply means giving digital tools a sense of how humans behave or think. In other words, it is about equipping digital tools with cognition capabilities that understand human needs. For example, e-commerce bots or virtual assistants would understand the situation context of what we want.
Over the coming years, we can witness more and more use cases of adaptive AI emerging within digital tools like Alexa, Siri, Google Cortana, data science dashboards.
The level of complexity of these use cases is also going to evolve. For instance, it could be as advanced as a business intelligence tool learning about your working style, the integration of adaptive AI into road safety software that can read our levels of distraction and fatigue to keep us safer behind the wheel, or an integration in upskilling and e-learning platforms that adapt to each of our unique ways of learning.
While adoption of AI is great, Jervis suggests the industry be mindful of digital integrity and data privacy when designing these digital tools.
Combining 5G capabilities such as high-speed connectivity, low latency with different technological advancements like immersive reality will unlock the full potential of 5G. This will lead to an evolution of connectivity called the Internet of Things.
The use of IoT in cities is fascinating. Breakthroughs happened through connected sensors capable of tracking air pollution, the gathering of live data from traffic, and helping road users to increase safety and also give them warnings of hazards in advance.
The digital twin model is like having a digital replica of our own body where you can test all sorts of health and fitness endurance activities on it before we do them in reality. The digital twin model, therefore, if applied to cities, can indeed have a transformative impact. The replica for cities can be created down to the last detail, with information feeding into those servers and systems that are coming in live from all the servers that are connected to different sources of information. It can then virtually test how certain changes would affect the city in real life.
Robotic surgery is another use case that demonstrates the use of sensors by the doctor at one end, and the exact procedure replicated by a robotic arm at the other end.
Next, is the internet of bodies which safely connects our bodies to internet connectivity. An example is digital pills with connected sensors that are swallowable and made of digestible material. These indeed are seeing development and the approval of the FDA. The digital pill via sensors can give you any warning signs (such as heart attacks, seizures) to our devices. This will allow us to take preventive action to mitigate serious illness.
Finally, when we examine the impact of the fourth industrial revolution, Shivvy believes that we are currently at more than halfway through. Organisations should create people-oriented programmes during the transformation process. They should focus on society’s expectations and profit moving at the same pace to fix pain points before to manage roadblocks to digital adoption.
