The current public debate about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and where it is taking society is a healthy reminder for everyone that we have choices. AI is a tool that helps people gain value from data but it does not guarantee value, or the outcomes a business wants to achieve.
It is up to us to choose the future we want to create and a success will come from building around people – particularly in the mode of co-creation. And thirdly, delivering value from data requires the ability to combine data and human knowledge from different fields and industries.
Choosing the future
Since 2013, Fujitsu has published an annual perspective on the future, the Fujitsu Technology and Service Vision. At the core of this is our belief that the long-term interests of people and society are fundamental to technological success.
Our purpose is to realise a safer, more prosperous society, where people come first, are empowered by technology and continuously create positive social outcomes. We call this a Human Centric Intelligent Society, and this is our vision for the future.
To better understand how to drive our vision forward, in the 2018 Fujitsu Technology and Service Vision we have published results of a global survey of business leaders that we commissioned. Our recent Digital Transformation Survey canvassed the views of 1,500 business leaders from around the world. Roughly 60% of them manage traditional (non-internet) companies, and 40% lead online companies. We were particularly interested to find out about what was motivating them, and the outcomes their businesses delivered.
The results of the survey showed the clear dependence on people. We asked the business leaders in our survey what their major challenges were, with the biggest challenge reported by non-online companies being ‘skill shortages’, followed by ‘internal resistance to change’ and ‘lack of agility’ in their organisation.
When we dug a little deeper, we found that organisations which had delivered outcomes showed strong capabilities across six factors: Leadership, People, Agility, Business Integration, Ecosystem and Value from Data. We call these six success factors ‘digital muscles’: the stronger an organisation’s digital muscles, the better the likelihood of achieving success.
Digital is hard – you can’t do it alone
The theme of the 2018 Fujitsu Technology and Service Vision is ‘Co-Creation for Success’. The importance of people skills for achieving digital maturity, combined with the difficulty reported in the survey by organisations in finding these skills, imply that the further we move into the era of digital transformation the greater the bottleneck to growth or survival will be. The World Bank predicts that if digital technology continues to disrupt traditional industries at the current rate, 30% of total global business revenue will be redistributed by 2025 to brand new players, meaning the choice of the word ‘survival’ here is not hyperbolic.
No business will be able to assure success by acting in isolation, or even at the head of a supply chain in a vertical industry. Existing players therefore have no choice but to pre-empt this scale of disruption by undertaking it themselves. However, delivering digital transformation quickly is non-trivial. By definition, it will not have been done before and therefore no team currently exists that knows what it is, or how to do it. Innovation on this scale simply cannot be outsourced or sub-contracted and success in the era of AI requires co-creation, where innovation is delivered more openly, through the coming together of different skills, capabilities, ideas and expertise.
Our survey backs this up: the companies that had already delivered outcomes in their digital transformation programs placed the highest importance on technology partners, followed by their customers. It is also interesting that online companies place a much higher value on ecosystem partners, including start-ups, companies from different industries or consortiums, than do the traditional companies.
This emphasis on the combined power of technology partners, customers and a wider ecosystem is fundamental to digital co-creation, which we believe is the best way of achieving digital transformation. It enables you to focus more strongly on creating value for your customers, to bring out the best in your people, and leverage the skills and capabilities that exist outside your organisation.
By taking this approach we have been able to work more closely than ever with our customers to deliver outcomes that are meaningful for their businesses. For instance, co-creating innovation that enabled a major financial services customer to attract 1,000 new mobile customers a day, or that enabled a major manufacturer assure production quality of wind turbine blades at fraction of the cost.
Creating value from data
The third implication of the choices we need to make is how to create value from data. Deep learning and other AI technologies are evolving remarkably, but exploiting data is not just a technology challenge. To generate outcomes for business and wider society, it is crucial to apply the most appropriate AI technologies across different types of data. To do this requires a coming together of business experience and technology know-how.
At its heart, digital is about creating business outcomes from data and creating value from data is one of the six digital muscles we looked at earlier. Business domain knowledge is needed to understand which data is important and what combinations of data might be the most useful. Secondly, different types of data require different types of technology. Many people might perceive deep learning can be applied to any data. But in reality, it is only good at handling specific types of data, for example, images and voice. Third, even if insights are identified from data, you need to decide what you do with them. To monetise the insight may require a new business model, which needs business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Towards the Learning Enterprise
The era of AI requires co-creation, where innovation is delivered more openly, the coming together of different skills, capabilities, ideas and expertise. Fujitsu believes that to accomplish the above a different sort of organisation is required – a ‘Learning Enterprise’. Learning Enterprises are forward looking and curious to explore and develop new ways to deliver value. They recognise the importance of traditional business practices, but they are not wedded to only exploiting their historical capabilities and markets. Learning enterprises continuously learn from data to create knowledge and innovation. They are value-creating, agile, responsive and dynamic. They are human centric.
To understand more about Learning Enterprise and how Fujitsu can help you realise the future you want for your enterprise and your customers, download the 2018 Fujitsu Technology and Service Vision here.
By David Gentle, Director of Foresight and Planning at Fujitsu.
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