The excitement around artificial intelligence is palpable. It seems that not a day goes by without one of the giants in the industry coming out with a breakthrough application of this technology, or a new nuance is added to the overall body of knowledge. Horizontal and industry-specific use cases of AI abound and there is always something exciting around the corner every single day.

However, with the keen interest from global leaders of multinational corporations, the conversation is shifting towards having a strategic agenda for AI in the enterprise. Business heads are less interested in topical experiments and minuscule productivity gains made in the short term. They are more keen to understand the impact of AI in their areas of work from a long-term standpoint. Perhaps the most important question that they want to see answered is – what will my new AI-enabled enterprise look like?

The question is as strategic as it is pertinent. For business leaders, the most important issues are – improving shareholder returns and ensuring a productive workforce – as part of running a sustainable, future-ready business. Artificial intelligence may be the breakout technology of our time, but business leaders are more occupied with trying to understand just how this technology can usher in a new era of their business, how it is expected to upend existing business value chains, unlock new revenue streams, and deliver improved efficiencies in cost outlays. In this article, let us try to answer these questions.

AI is Disrupting Existing Value Chains

Ever since Michael Porter first expounded on the concept in his best-selling book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, the concept of the value chain has gained great currency in the minds of business leaders globally. The idea behind the value chain was to map out the interlinkages between the primary activities that work together to conceptualize and bring a product / service to market (R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, marketing, etc.), as well as the role played by support activities performed by other internal functions (finance, HR, IT etc.). Strategy leaders globally leverage the concept of value chains to improve business planning, identify new possibilities for improving business efficiency and exploit potential areas for new growth.

Now with AI entering the fray, we might see new vistas in the existing value chains of multinational corporations. For instance:

• Manufacturing is becoming heavily augmented by artificial intelligence and robotics. We are seeing these technologies getting a stronger foothold across processes requiring increasing sophistication. Business leaders need to now seriously consider workforce planning for a labor force that consists both human and artificial workers at their manufacturing units. Due attention should also be paid in ensuring that both coexist in a symbiotic and complementary manner.
• • Logistics and Delivery are two other areas where we are seeing a steady growth in the use of artificial intelligence. Demand planning and fulfilment through AI has already reached a high level of sophistication at most retailers. Now Amazon – which handles some of the largest and most complex logistics networks in the world – is in advanced stages of bringing in unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) for deliveries through their Amazon Prime Air program. Business leaders expect outcomes to range from increased customer satisfaction (through faster deliveries) and reduction in costs for the delivery process.
  • Marketing and Sales are constantly on the forefront for some of the most exciting inventions in AI. One of the most recent and evolved applications of AI is Reactful. A tool developed for eCommerce properties, Reactful helps drive better customer conversions by analyzing the clickstream and digital footprints of people who are on web properties and persuades them into making a purchase. Business leaders need to explore new ideas such as this that can help drive meaningful engagement and top line growth through these new AI-powered tools.

  AI is Enabling New Revenue Streams

  The second way business leaders are thinking strategically around AI is for its potential to unlock new sources of revenue. Earlier, functions such as internal IT were seen as a cost center. In today’s world, due to the cost and competitive pressure, areas of the business which were traditionally considered to be cost centers are require to reinvent themselves into revenue and profit centers. The expectation from AI is no different. There is a need to justify the investments made in this technology – and find a way for it to unlock new streams of revenue in traditional organizations. Here are two key ways in which business leaders can monetize AI:

  • Indirect Monetization is one of the forms of leveraging AI to unlock new revenue streams. It involves embedding AI into traditional business processes with a focus on driving increased revenue. We hear of multiple companies from Amazon to Google that use AI-powered recommendation engines to drive incremental revenue through intelligent recommendations and smarter bundling. The action item for business leaders is to engage stakeholders across the enterprise to identify areas where AI can be deeply ingrained within tech properties to drive incremental revenue.
  • Direct Monetization involves directly adding AI as a feature to existing offerings. Examples abound in this area – from Salesforce bringing in Einstein into their platform as an AI-centric service to cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft adding AI capabilities into their cloud offerings. Business leaders should brainstorm about how AI augments their core value proposition and how it can be added into their existing product stack.

  AI is Bringing Improved Efficiencies

  The third critical intervention for a new AI-enabled enterprise is bringing to the fore a more cost-effective business. Numerous topical and early-stage experiments with AI have brought interesting success for reducing the total cost of doing business. Now is the time to create a strategic roadmap for these efficiency-led interventions and quantitatively measure their impact to business. Some food for thought for business leaders include:

  • Supply Chain Optimization is an area that is ripe for AI-led disruption. With increasing varieties of products and categories and new virtual retailers arriving on the scene, there is a need for companies to reduce their outlay on the network that procures and delivers goods to consumers. One example of AI augmenting the supply chain function comes from Evertracker – a Hamburg-based startup. By leveraging IOT sensors and AI, they help their customers identify weaknesses such as delays and possible shortages early, basing their analysis on internal and external data. Business leaders should scout for solutions such as these that rely on data to identify possible tweaks in the supply chain network that can unlock savings for their enterprises.
  • Human Resources is another area where AI-centric solutions can be extremely valuable to drive down the turnaround time for talent acquisition. One such solution is developed by Recualizer – which reduces the need for HR staff to scan through each job application individually. With this tool, talent acquisition teams need to first determine the framework conditions for a job on offer, while leaving the creation of assessment tasks to the artificial intelligence system. The system then communicates the evaluation results and recommends the most suitable candidates for further interview rounds. Business leaders should identify such game-changing solutions that can make their recruitment much more streamlined – especially if they receive a high number of applications.
  • The Customer Experience arena also throws up very exciting AI use cases. We have now gone well beyond just bots answering frequently asked questions. Today, AI-enabled systems can also provide personalized guidance to customers that can help organizations level-up on their customer experience, while maintaining a lower cost of delivering that experience. Booking.com is a case in point. Their chatbot helps customers identify interesting activities and events that they can avail of at their travel destinations. Business leaders should explore such applications that provide the double advantage of improving customer experience, while maintaining strong bottom-line performance.

  The possibilities for the new AI-enabled enterprises are as exciting as they are varied. The ideas shared in this article are by no means exhaustive, but hopefully seed in interesting ideas for powering improved business performance. Strategy leaders and business heads need to consider how their AI-led businesses can help disrupt their existing value chains for the better, and unlock new ideas for improving bottom-line and top-line performance. This will usher in a new era of the enterprise, enabled by AI.

Across the world of technology, we are seeing the proliferation of new age developments across software and hardware – titled “Exponential Technologies”. The term refers to a wide range of recent technology breakthroughs – Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Augmented and Virtual Reality, Blockchain and the allied. They are collectively referred to as ‘exponential’ considering the humungous potential value that they could possibly add to business. As these technologies continue to mature in their development and adoption, the world is gaining a more concrete insight into the worth of these technologies and their use cases. 2019 will most certainly be the year where these technologies will go mainstream – and deliver exponential value to their proponents. With high investor interest (and money) riding on these new age technologies, I am confident that in 2019, there will be a high uptake in their commercialization. Here are the top10 trends that I foresee in 2019 in exponential technologies :

1. Blockchain Beyond the Hype

In 2018, there was no doubt a lot of excitement and buzz as technology vendors and investors started investigating blockchain and cryptocurrency. In 2019, expect blockchain to move beyond the hype and enter the mainstream. Gartner estimates that blockchain applications will create $3.1 trillion in business value by 2030. Over 2018, several tech-savvy businesses started their own experiments with blockchain in areas such as supply chain, which is ripe for a blockchain-powered disruption. Within blockchain, I foresee:

Increased collaboration between businesses and tech vendors to unlock the power of blockchain across multiple use cases. Given its immutable and decentralized nature, blockchain will be invaluable in sectors such as manufacturing, defense and financial services – and we will see innovative use cases coming out of these domains

Within blockchain, smart contracts specifically will gain immense traction. The business value of smart contracts is remarkably clear – they drastically reduce the time and effort for routine but lengthy paperwork processes, while maintaining the sanctity through a blockchain network

Due to the numerous crypto frauds seen uncovered in the last year, more and more sovereign governments will push legislation to regulate and establish clear rules around blockchain and cryptocurrency. I have no doubts that this will have a net positive impact – as it will demonstrably improve the consumer confidence and enterprise adoption for these technologies by laying down a clear legal framework for their use

2. 3rd Platform Technology to Accelerate Digital Transformation

A combination of social, mobile, data-driven decision-making and cloud infrastructure and processing is commonly referred to today as 3rd platform technology. In 2019, there will be no stopping the juggernaut of internal IT departments moving ever faster towards digital technology.

According to a research by IDC, it is expected that by 2023, 75% of all IT spending will be on such 3rd platform technology, with over 90% of all enterprises building “digital native” IT environments

Further advanced technologies such as distributed cloud, hyperagile app technologies and architectures, AI at the edge and AI-powered voice UIs will be central to how enterprises enable digital transformation using 3rd platform technologies.

This expansion in demand for 3rd platform technologies will be the outcome on increasing pressures on internal IT to become profit centers and unlocking new sources of revenue for the parent enterprise. Using easily scalable and replicable digital frameworks, early adopter IT departments would be able to commercialize this technologies to their competitors while giving their businesses critical competitive advantage

3. Quantum Computing to Come of Age

Quantum computing is a non-traditional form of computing operating on the quantum state of subatomic particles and representing information as elements denoted through quantum bits. The unmitigated rise in the development and permeation of quantum computing is the third key trend that I see for 2019. It is estimated that by 2023, 20% of organizations will carve out budgets for quantum computing projects, as opposed to less than 1% today.

 With heavier software paradigms such as Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and blockchain achieving mainstream status, there will be large scale demand for quantum computing to come out of the shadows of academia and into business. Quantum computing will move well beyond a buzzword and will be part of multiple projects at an experimental scale at corporations.

Quantum Computing will succeed where traditional computing has failed, providing parallel execution and exponential scalability. Such systems will take on problems too complex for a traditional approach or where the latency for traditional algorithms would be untenable

Business leaders across multiple industries – automotive, financial, insurance, pharmaceuticals, military and research organizations – will see massive gains through the advancements in Quantum Computing .

 4.Acceleration in the Pervasiveness of the Internet of Things

While Internet of Things has demonstrably hit mainstream status across industries such as consumer goods and retail, and use cases such as supply chain and logistics, we will see further acceleration in its adoption in 2019

 IOT-enabled hardware devices will proliferate nearly all walks of human life. Devices from sensors, wearables, smart assistants and wearables will be a feature in everyday life for most individuals in the developed world and will be a key focus for powering digital transformation

With increasing demand for IOT-powered devices across use cases will definitively bring endpoint security into focus for enterprises. As IOT devices become the first frontier for communication with consumers through highly sensorized environments, we will see a rapid escalation in the adoption of endpoint security practices and software

To support this deep network of the Internet of Things will require an immediate focus on rapidly enabling 5G connectivity in 2019. Not having a robust underlying infrastructure to support IOT will be disastrous for businesses and individuals who will be highly reliant on it for their day-to-day activity.

 5. Convergence of AI, Blockchain, Cloud and IO

Could a future software stack comprise AI, Blockchain and IOT running on the cloud? It is not too hard to imagine how these exponential technologies can come together to create great value. In 2019, I expect that we will see a strong spread of use cases that effectively combine these technologies.

Internet of Things devices will largely be the interface with which consumers and other societal stakeholder will interact. Voice-enabled and always connected devices – such as Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa will augment the customer experience and eventually become the primary point of contact with businesses

Artificial Intelligence frameworks such as Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing are making huge advances. These will be the translation layer between the sensor on one end and the deciphering technology on the other end

Blockchain-like decentralized databases will act as the immutable core for managing contracts, consumer requests and transactions between various parties in the supply chain

Cloud will be the mainstay for running these applications requiring huge computational resources and very high availability. I expect more cloud vendors to come forward (Amazon and Google for instance already have) with specialized cloud frameworks to handle the torrent of requests that these type of applications would require.

6.New UI/UX Interfaces to Emerge on the Scene

To unlock and harness the true value of exponential technology it is incumbent that we do not rely only on existing paradigms of end-user interfaces such as web and mobile. We need to reinvent new paradigms and explore game changing new interfaces that will help usher better customer and user experiences.

 Conversational platforms – ones which are primarily activated through voice and voice-recognition AI will conduct numerous exchanges on behalf of customers. Already we are seeing rapid adoption of conversational interfaces such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri. These will only grow and prominence and entire CX use cases will be centered around these platforms

Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) will be increasingly leveraged across a vast selection of topical use cases. Incorporating these alongside traditional interfaces will be crucial to delivering the future of an immersive user experience. According to Gartner, we will shift from thinking about individual devices and fragmented user interface (UI) technologies to a multichannel and multimodal experience.

These immersive experience-led interfaces such as VR and AR will become increasingly popular, with 70% of enterprises experimenting with such technology for consumer and enterprise use and 25% of organizations deploying it into production.

7.Edge Computing to become an Enterprise Mandate

Simply put, edge computing is a computing topology in which information processing, and content collection and delivery, are placed closer to these endpoints. For reducing the latency running AI algorithms and eventual response times, edge computing will become an enterprise mandate for use cases involving a convergence of IOT and AI.

In 2019, adoption of edge computing will be driven by the need to keep the processing power close to endpoints as opposed to a centralized cloud server. Having said that, edge computing will not necessitate the creation of a new architecture. Cloud and edge computing will complement each other. Cloud services will be charged with centralized service execution, not only on centralized servers, but also across distributed servers on-premises and on-the-edge devices themselves.

Five years down the line expect to see specialized AI chips, supporting greater processing power, storage and other advanced capabilities. They will be incorporated into a wider array of edge devices. Not too far into the future, we will see 40% of organizations’ cloud deployments include an element of edge computing and 25% of endpoint devices and systems will execute AI algorithms.

We will see more intelligent and empowered edge computing devices as well. According to Gartner, storage, computing and advanced AI and analytics capabilities will expand the capabilities of edge devices through 2028.

8. DevOps Augmented by AI

Despite almost universal acceptance of the DevOps framework across global enterprises, adoption has been patchy and slow. This is due to numerous reasons, ranging from a distributed toolset and a paucity of expert practitioners. However with the emergence of AI, we will see an increased process automation between software development and deployment, accelerating the enablement of DevOps

AI-powered QA suites will increase the automation quotient in the DevOps process. Given the advancements seen in automation, AI will rapidly intervene in the QA process across unit testing, regression testing, functional testing and user acceptance testing.

DevSecOps will combine the power of DevOps and AI in the field of information security. A centralized logging architecture recording suspicious activity and threats combined with ML-based anomaly detection techniques will empower developers to accurately pinpoint potential threats to their system and secure it for the future.

AI will also break the cultural barriers that typically exist between developer and operations teams. . AI-powered systems will enable DevOps teams to have a single, unified view into system issues across a complex toolchain while improving the collective knowledge of anomalies detected and the pathways for redressal.

 9.Autonomous Things on the Rise:

At present, we are seeing experiments at an advanced level in the field of autonomous things. Autonomous things comprise whole gamut of unmanned objects – from drones, cars and robots. In 2019, I expect there to be a steady rise in the adoption and appreciation of this area of technology

 Autonomous things of today are largely centered around the current paradigm of basic automation and rigid if-else programming rules. The next revolution in the field of autonomous things will be by exploiting the power of AI to exhibit more advanced, proactive and multi-threaded behaviors

Demand for autonomous things will continue to grow, specifically for autonomous vehicles. According to a Gartner survey, by 2021, 10% of new vehicles will have autonomous driving capability, compared to less than 1% in 2017.

Robotics and drones powered by AI will be able to address more complex use cases bringing in further efficiencies to incumbent businesses in the field of logistics delivery, warehouse management and manufacturing

10. AI to Disrupt Cybersecurity

Finally, the last key trend in the exponential technologies space for 2019 pertains to cybersecurity. While this is a remarkably advanced field, we will see continued growth and evolution of cybersecurity in combination with artificial intelligence

 Using anomaly detection and machine learning, AI will hugely disrupt the field of cyber security. Security practitioners will be empowered to identify intrusions and malafide behavior faster using automated, always-on algorithms to constantly survey the secured network for wrongful activity and address concerns before they break-ins occur

AI can be quickly training over a massive data set of cyber security, network, and even physical information. Cyber security vendors will soon roll out AI-enabled solutions that will learn at an abstract level to detect and block abnormal behavior, even when this behavior does not fit within a known pattern. I expect that in 2019 companies will incorporate ML into every category of cybersecurity products.

By extension, we will see a fight between good AI and bad AI in the domain of cybersecurity. There are genuine fears that the next generation of attacks will not be carried out by human hackers but pieces of code designed to rapidly infiltrate a secure environment. Countering that with so-called ‘good AI’ will be crucial in undermining the impact these fast-paced attacks can have