The AI Future Of Business: 3 Big Shifts

[Music]
so what i want you to do now is to
really ask yourself the more interesting
question which isn't
can we cut costs or increase efficiency
with technology
but rather
what is now possible in an age of
artificial intelligence
that was simply not before
and i put it to you that there's a
number of big shifts that are going to
happen in our world in the next five to
ten years
the first shift i see is the shift from
businesses to platforms
you know what is a platform is a
platform just a scaled-up business is it
just a business that's gotten faster and
more laden with technology i don't think
so there's something different about a
company that sees itself as a platform
and for me
that difference
is that platforms are able to constantly
learn from all of their interactions
with their customers
and they do that in a very scaled up way
i'll give an example it's fascinating
what's going on right now with
e-commerce and retail i mean you're
seeing especially during the pandemic so
many resources now going into smarter
warehouses smarter pick and pack
facilities more intelligent resilient
supply chains
what's going on and why
i used to think this was just about
lowering the total possible cost to the
consumer the speed of deliveries
in fact i used to think that a company
like amazon
used to have these giant indiana jones
style warehouses somewhere
you know like at the final scene in the
movie where they're hiding the ark of
the covenant right with everything ever
made by human beings just waiting to
ship out i was really surprised because
a couple of years back i actually did
some work from amazon and i worked with
their global logistics team
and i was shocked that
in many cases the item that you order is
not even in stock until a few days
before you order it
you see an algorithm at amazon
based on your data
predicts
what you're going to order and actually
brings it into the supply chain
even before you knew you wanted it
now that's crazy isn't it
they've got a patent on it they call it
anticipatory shipping
i call it freaky as hell shipping
and it's not just amazon it's a number
of these big players now investing in
this kind of technology and can you
imagine the very near future you're
going to be you know be working from
home
okay let's be honest you're you're doing
some shopping
and uh you know you're kind of hanging
out seats you can see some stuff you
like and you know you kind of
you're just about to click by now
when suddenly you're distracted because
you hear this this kind of whirring
sound outside your window and you go
outside and there's one of these brand
new yellow and black amazon delivery
drones descending from the sky and you
go okay this is this is strange i don't
remember an order anything anyway so it
drops this parcel on your front yard so
you walk out and you get it
you look inside and you immediately drop
it to the ground because there in the
box was the very thing you're just
looking at on your screen a minute ago
how did they know
alexa
you're going to be running around the
house in paranoia right unplugging all
your elixir devices
i mean you're already a bit suspicious
right that jeff bezos when he's not
flying to the moon is like listening on
all your conversations
you needn't have been concerned
amazon doesn't need to spy on you to
understand what you want by looking at
your data they know you better than you
know yourselves
and that's not to say we can all become
amazons or all become giant platforms
but if you're going to play in a
platform world
you yourselves have to be thinking how
do i go beyond just thinking about costs
to using data to better understand my
customers
and if you saw the the deal that uh
accumulator did recently with big
commerce to tap into amazon's
fulfillment program
this is the kind of scaled-up thinking
that's going to be important in this new
world
the second big shift for me is to shift
from transactions to experiences now
what all these brands
and familiar apps have in common
spotify uber netflix
for me they've all done an amazing job
at making you forget the underlying
financial transaction let me think about
it
what did you pay for your last uber ride
do you have any idea
a few people do
you're in the accounting department
aren't you
okay you're forgiven
uh
what do you pay on average on netflix if
you think about all the movies you're
watching divided by your subscription
cost or spotify for the music you listen
to i mean it's ridiculous question you
don't even really pay attention
and that's because the experience is so
good
that you no longer really think about
the money
that's the power of moving from
transactions to experiences
and it's not just these born in the
cloud apps
it's companies like starbucks as well i
mean starbucks is not a coffee company
it's a data driven technology platform
and this is not a new thing i mean if
you look
really at the
when they when starbucks came out of the
financial crisis in 2008 they started
heavily using data to improve their site
selection and to really understand the
effectiveness of their individual real
estate portfolio and then that of course
morphed into their use of loyalty
programs and mobile payment they now
have a program called deep brew so
they're actually using artificial
intelligence to automate more of the
running of the coffee shop now they're
not trying to get rid of the barista
right
but what they're hoping is that by using
things like voice recognition that when
someone comes up to place an order and
they've got one of those ridiculous
highly personalized orders
if you're one of those people you know
who you are
right you've seen it on a tick tock
video or something right
uh
the machine is actually listening to you
so by the time you finish ordering it's
already ready
and this is the kind of ways in which we
can now leverage technology to go beyond
just counting costs
to thinking about customer experience
the third shift for me is the shift from
data to insights and this is where you
become a different type of organization
in the last couple of years uber has
actually launched seven thousand new
restaurants
these are restaurants that have no
physical
form at all
they run in ghost kitchen so if you can
imagine these giant warehouses of people
preparing food for restaurants that
don't
exist
because what ubereats realized was that
by looking at all the data of people
searching for like fusion
korean tex-mex in austin
that
there was an opening for a restaurant
that actually needed to exist
so they were able to use that data to
creatively
invent new opportunities
and it's not just ubereats there are a
number of companies now who are
transforming data to become different
types of organizations another really
interesting example from the building
industry is a company called buildups
from israel they've started putting
head mounted cameras
on construction crews so the idea is is
that as the the construction workers are
moving around a site they're actually
updating a real-time model of the
building a kind of a digital twin which
can be matched against the
the digital cad files
and this allows them to not only get a
sense in real time of the progress of
construction or whether all the you know
the electrical sockets been put in the
right place or not this actually flows
through to risk management and it's tied
into your ability to draw down more uh
amounts of money from your loan
transfers from a bank
totally transforms site mismanagement
costs which mckinsey estimates costs
upwards to 1.7 trillion a year
[Music]
so
when you bring these ideas together for
me it's pretty clear that the digital
transformation of the world has begun
this new era of ai powered competition
will reshape the future of business
now is the time to invest in the digital
capabilities supporting your own digital
transformation