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5 things Accenture, Microsoft, AB Inbev and other big companies are doing now that your company will do tomorrow

Margie Manning

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Stu Brown, Accenture managing director and Tampa office lead

In an era when every business is a digital business, professional services firm Accenture is highlighting five emerging trends that will help companies get to the next level.

The trends, ranging from cutting edge technologies to security to personalization, are what companies need to succeed in the current environment, said Stu Brown, Accenture managing director and Tampa office lead.

“We’re in the post-digital era. Does that mean digital is dead? No, it means we’re all digital now,” Brown said at the poweredUP Tampa Bay Tech series Friday.

Digital technologies such as social media, mobile, analytics and cloud are part of the core functions at 79 percent of the more than 6,600 businesses worldwide that Accenture surveyed for Accenture Technology Vision 2019.

“So the question is in an environment where everyone is digital, how do you differentiate as a client, as a customer, as an employee, as an employer?” Brown asked.

Here’s what Accenture believes is on the horizon.

DARQ Power. DARQ is an acronym for four technologies — distributed ledger (including blockchain), artificial intelligence, extended reality (both virtual and augmented reality) and quantum computing, which involves computations exponentially faster than existing computers are capable of.

Biogen is using quantum computing for drug discovery and distribution. Airbus is using it for flight optimization. “Whether it’s airport delays, traffic patterns, weather, you name it, the data we crunch in quantum is much faster,” Brown said.

Artificial intelligence is helping Microsoft track supplies. And a consortium including AB InBev, APL, and Kuehne + Nagel developed a blockchain solution to save hundreds of millions of dollars for the freight and logistics industry, the report said.

Get to know me. “We believe you’ve got to know the customer. CRM [customer relationship management] changes in the new world because of the amount of data we have,” Brown said. “There were 3.7 million google searches in the last minute, 39 million WhatsApp messages, 168 million emails, and 1.1 million people swiping on Tinder … Customers are putting data out there all the time. How you use that data is really critical to think about.”

Slicepay, a lending platform to serve unbanked students in India, looks at Facebook posts to determine what to offer. John Hancock uses data to price life insurance policies.

“They’ve started building a market where they’ve been able to give you wearables and sensors and other things to determine real time pricing on insurance that changes with how you interact with your life,” Brown said. “People are fine with that, especially people who are healthy, are fine with the ability to say, ‘I’ll give you more data if you give me something more tailored to me,’ and it takes the risk away from the business.”

Human+ worker, or how humans and machines will work together going forward.

“Ninety percent of jobs will be changed because of AI, and 50 percent of those will change dramatically,” Brown said.

He cited Accenture’s own back office operations, made up of about 200,000 workers. While that line of business has grown 15 percent year-over-year for the last six years, the headcount has stayed the same.

“That group used to do manual tasks. Now, all that’s automated. That’s all bots and AI,” he said. “So the things people do in our back offices is the brain-based work that you want to do every day, not the rote-based task work that nobody wants to do every day … We reward our people for finding those efficiencies, not fire them for it.”

Unilver has changed the way it hires, moving to skill-based games and other non-traditional interview techniques in order to increase its hiring pool and get to a hiring decision faster. The company also saw more diverse job candidates, Brown said.

Secure us to secure me.

“This is the biggest challenge we have. Every day we’re under threats,” he said.

Brown cited collaborations by global payments companies JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Fidelity and others.

“They’ve started coming together and they do these tabletop exercises and they noticed differences in what they do so and try to learn from each other and adapt,” Brown said. “They realized they’re all at risk together. It’s not competitive to talk about risk. If one goes down, the entire group gets hit.”

My markets. “All the other things lead to this. As a consumer, I want stuff when I want it and the way that I want it, and I may determine when that happens, so you’ve got to be ready,” Brown said.

Carnival Cruise Lines will reserve seats to shows on board based on passengers’ preferences, even before they are on the vessel. Paper Boats, a drink company in India, makes regionally specific drinks — even single-day festival drinks — and is a rapidly-growing business.

Technology can be bad, leading to data breaches and fake news among other consequences. It also can be used for good, such as better yields for agriculture crops and medicines that extend lives.

“Technology is a tool. Humans are flawed and we sometimes apply it the wrong way, and there’s bad actors out there,” Brown said. “In general, I think technology is good and is used for good. It’s the perception of how people see it.”

Friday’s poweredUP event was the first in an expanded series of events planned by Tampa Bay Tech, Florida’s largest technology council. The next event is the poweredUP Tampa Bay Tech Festival, May 23 at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg

 

 

 

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