What we do
OUTLOOK
The digital world that we will embrace in this decade looks bright, though its downsides need to be examined and addressed satisfactorily.
AI and other related technologies will identify anomalies and patterns with greater precision and automate more tasks. They will also augment humans in diagnosis, prediction/forecasting, and decision making. AI is a great tool to enhance human intelligence. IoT will make a significant impact on logistic, energy generation and distribution, healthcare, home/building automation, and smart cities. Drones and self-driving vehicles will be employed in new ways to automate existing and radically new applications.
Immersive technologies will redefine the human experience and interaction with the physical and cyber world. Several technologies in combination will enable smart spaces everywhere, which, among other things, will enable more efficient operations, provide a seamless interactive experience, help reduce environmental impact, and promote coordination and collaboration among interacting entities. Technologies will be embraced to realize the United Nations sustainability goals.
As everything becomes connected and interdependent and more systems become fully or partially autonomous, security vulnerabilities will increase, and addressing the threat landscape will become more challenging. We need to embed cybersecurity everywhere and at every stage.
The ability to understand and make decisions using data and the ability to relate to and interact with machines, as well as people in other disciplines, will become a necessity. Effectively integrating several technologies to address real-world problems requires a broader knowledge base and will pose new challenges. The future of work will be a collaborative effort between humans, machines, and robots, as well as between humans.
Professions will be reshaped and more technology-driven, and professionals will need to reskill and upskill in tune with the demands of their profession. Academic research will be focused on addressing real problems and making a real and significant impact on people and businesses. Business, industry, and government will need to continue to keep pace with an ever-evolving smarter world.
Ongoing and anticipated developments are promising and are poised to drastically transform the world—both in what we do and how we do it—for good, in large part. Organizations and individuals that fail to pay attention to the developing trends outlined here will be putting themselves at risk. It is time to start preparing now for the new digital world.
Quoting Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media: “The lessons of technological innovation remind us that progress always entails thinking the unthinkable and then doing things that were previously impossible.”
Let’s envision and build a future digital world that we want, for good.