Power Real-Time Customer Experiences
Deliver experiences tailored to customers’ online behavior, in real time. Oracle Cloud CX helps you turn intelligence into relevant and personalized experiences in the moments that matter.
Global Report
The Epoch of Human Existential Awareness
Emerging technologies hold the promise of bridging the digital gap, leveling the playing field, and ensuring a more equitable society.
Authors:
Evan Kichheimer, Vice President, Service Provider Group
Adrian Dominic Ho, Practice Leader, Enterprise Digital Services
We live in extraordinary times where societies and industries are transforming in front of our eyes.
Global events such as the pandemic, political instability, and unsustainable environmental damage are threatening the world around us as we know it, rewriting traditional assumptions and norms.
The continuous acceleration of technological breakthroughs like the rapid rise of automation and AI is forcing corporations to reinvent themselves and adapt at an ever-faster pace to changing regulations and market dynamics.
While the global pandemic accelerated digital transformation faster than any single executive could ever have imagined, the climate- and equality-driven Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) mega-trend is creating a rising tide of business culture transformation, fueling massive shifts and changes in priorities and workplaces practices as well as the rethinking of ICT investment priorities.
Yet in the face of these challenges there is reason for optimism. There is also a greater appreciation and confidence that technology that can play a greater role in resolving some of the critical business and societal challenges of the next decade. For many enterprises, technology has become the cornerstone of all future investment as it is the building block for delivering the next set of digital innovations, products, and services.
In addition, both governments and corporations have realized that technology is one of the biggest platforms they can leverage to democratize digital training and education, ensuring a highly skilled and more prosperous, equitable society. Emerging technologies hold the promise of bridging the digital gap and leveling the playing field, thus helping to ensure that such a society develops.
Societies and Businesses of 2030
During the next 10 years, a conflation of societal, technological, and environmental factors will create positive changes and opportunities along with challenges for the way we live, work, and play.
SOCIETY
BUSINESS
Opportunities
- Greater, fairer access to digital technologies and education.
- Connectivity and automation, creating a smarter world.
- Technologies help improve societal and environmental impact.
Challenges
- Increased prevalence of digital abuse, including misinformation and personal data risks.
- Rapid change in skills requirements through increased workforce automation.
- Accelerating technological dependency deepens the digital divide.
Innovation and customer experience are top of the corporate agenda for the next decade
Accelerating technological, environmental, and social pressures will create a plethora of new challenges and opportunities for businesses. The survey clearly identifies three clear corporate priorities over the next decade (see Figure 1 below).
Innovation is top of mind. The pace of innovation has been relentless and will accelerate. Industries are constantly being disrupted by new players and many have struggled to respond to keep pace. These new competitors have raised the bar for innovation. As such, many enterprises now facing an existential threat of survival are compelled to match the pace of innovation or become irrelevant. Approximately 34% of survey respondents cited innovation as a key business challenge.
Customer experience will be a key battleground and a point of differentiation. For B2C enterprises, the battle will be fought on both the digital and physical in-store experiences. In the past, most enterprises adopted a zero- or light-touch approach to customer experience, viewing investment as a necessary cost of doing business. Those who have underinvested and fallen behind are now prioritizing the customer experience. Enterprises are building an omnichannel model with hyper-personalization of marketing and experiences. Some 31% of respondents rated improving customer experience as a key business objective.
Building IT resiliency to support innovation and growth. With innovation comes growth, and enterprises need resilient infrastructure to support expansion. IT spending will be centered on agility and simplicity to enhance operational efficiency. Security will be a key component of any digital initiative.
Figure 1: Top Business Challenges
34%
of respondents state that Innovation is a top business challenge.
30%
of respondents state that Customer Experience and Engagement is a top business challenge.
Equality and Sustainability Top the Societal Agenda
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) frame societal challenges in 17 categories covering human needs and rights, energy, technology innovation, the environment, and biodiversity. There is a growing awareness of the societal impact of the inequality of global access to technology, education, and skills. Technology has a role to play in societal inclusion and bringing opportunity for everyone. The Omdia Horizons survey results covering the main societal challenges mirror this as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Top Societal Challenges
- The pandemic-accelerated global digital transformation has also served to deepen the digital divide, resulting in tech inclusion and connectivity as top societal challenge for the next five to 10 years.
- Vital services are migrated to digital, including health, trade, employment, and education. In our ever-increasing digitalized world, digital inclusion has broad societal impact. A significant proportion of society has not been able to leverage these channels, giving rise to a long-term prospect and consequence that the disadvantaged will be left even further behind. Respondents to our survey ranked the provision of equal access to education and skills training in second place.
- Environmental welfare and sustainability is ranked third, indicating that there is a growing awareness that the speed of environmental destruction is threatening the cohesion and stability of societies and markets. This has led to an increased interest and investment in technologies that support greener outcomes and lower carbon emissions.
- Advancing connectivity, inclusion, and education tech drive positive impacts across all economies and societies; our respondents see these as improving equality, transparency, social awareness, and the climate.
Horizon’s Top Technologies 2021–30
Technology will be instrumental in resolving some of the top corporate and societal challenges and objectives. Figures 3 and 4 below are the top technologies cited by our respondents that will have the greatest impact in resolving key corporate and societal goals over the next decade.
Figure 3: Top 10 Technologies to Tackle Business Challenges
Figure 4: Top 10 Technologies to Tackle Societal Challenges
Note: Figures 3 and 4 show average readiness scores for each technology, which is an average weighting of several factors including the importance of each technology, the availability of budgets, C-suite backing, and availability of skill sets.
The Future Will be 5G-Enabled
Respondents rated 5G as the top technology that can help resolve business and societal challenges. With speed improvements, 5G
The transformational elements of 5G will come from the applications that ride on it, supporting the key business goals of customer engagement and innovation (see Figure 5). Some 38% of respondents stated that they will use 5G to obtain faster customer insights and feedback. This will be key to delivering better customer experience and personalization.
Other applications cited by respondents include augmented and virtual reality, which can transform the retail experience, as well as employee collaboration. 5G will also be the enabler of innovation and cornerstone of IT resiliency across many industries through system and process automation with real-time analytics. Innovation includes telemedicine in healthcare, robotics in manufacturing and retail, and supporting predictive operations. More importantly, 5G will also be a critical part of delivery of Industrial IoT (IIoT), edge solutions, smarter cities, and autonomous vehicles.
Figure 5: Top 5 application scenarios for 5G
5G also holds the promise of extending quality access to digital services to more citizens at better cost, giving them access to digital services and training. Smart-city initiatives globally are also relying on 5G to improve the quality and range of services offered to citizens. 5G may also bring these services to remote areas that previously were unable to benefit due to lack of fixed fiber investment.
Societal and employee upskilling with e-learning/e-training
Respondents to the Omdia Horizons survey ranked democratization of technology access and education and skills training in second place in terms of the positive impacts on both society and business in the five- to 10-year timeframe.
Over the next decade, technologies such as computing, artificial intelligence, security, and cloud will evolve rapidly. Businesses are already faced with skills challenges, but if the existing workforce is not trained fast enough, a chronic skill shortage will become a major impediment to growth. Second, failure to upskill staff will also be a missed opportunity for enterprises because they will not be able to leverage these technologies to build further success and be more competitive. There is a realization by enterprises and governments that a highly skilled and productive workforce is critical for future growth.
Keeping up with these changes, let alone maximizing their potential, will be a challenge for many businesses. The scope of e-learning/e-training is broad, extending from the mobilization of traditional computer-based training technologies, through to advanced AI-supported skill development and virtual, augmented, or XR experiential training. Fundamentally, the objectives are to empower every employee with the skills needed to embrace digitalization and ensure that no one is left behind. Easy access to e-training/e-learning is a key building block for a fairer and more equal society, giving all citizens more access to the tools needed to upskill.
A Highly Connected, Data-driven World
Edge services and IIoT were ranked high-priority investments by enterprises and are highly co-related. Edge services is about bringing data closer to the enterprise campus allowing for faster extraction and analyzing of data. Edge services have evolved over the years, moving from tactical (e.g., data processing) to more transformational deployments. In Figure 6 below are some of the top use cases cited by enterprises for edge services. Increasingly, enterprises are leveraging edge for faster data analytics and AI and machine-learning delivering insights to support innovation, better customer experience, and ultimately operational efficiency.
Figure 6: Top 6 Applications or Initiatives Targeted with eEdge Computing
Industrial IoT will be increasingly implemented across manufacturing, utilities, mining, and logistics. The top priorities as shown in Figure 7 are improving productivity and efficiencies followed by transforming customer experience and creating completely new business models (supporting innovation), all of which support key corporate objectives over the next decade.
Figure 7: Areas of IIoT Disruption in Organizations
Multicloud Computing will Deliver IT Resiliency and Underpin Innovation Agenda
Roughly 80% of enterprises surveyed by Omdia are adopting a multicloud strategy for their digital infrastructure. Enterprises are also moving core workloads and applications to the cloud. There is a growing urgency for cloud migration for several reasons:
- COVID-19 has demonstrated that agile infrastructure is a good hedge for any crisis.
- Agile infrastructure is key foundation to support a rapid innovation culture especially for both development and the launch of new services.
- Simplification, modernization, and operational efficiency themes tie in neatly with cloud platforms.
- Cloud remains cost-effective when implemented well.
A Highly Autonomous Digital Enterprise
While not called out as a specific technology, automation features heavily in the five- to 10-year period of the Omdia Horizons survey. Automation is increasingly integrated across processes to drive greater efficiencies within the enterprise.
The theme of automation spans several technologies in the survey. Respondents rated robotic process automation (RPA), sixth and robotics seventh among corporate technologies while smart systems such as homes or cities and autonomous vehicles were in the top five technologies that our respondents flagged as transforming society.
- Improving productivity is the top driver for adopting automation. Some 63% of respondents stated that the greatest impact of RPA is in the area of improved productivity. This was followed by improving accuracy, cited by 48%. Following this theme of improved productivity from automation, the highest-ranked robotics use case (41%) is to improve the overall productivity of an organization. Expect greater use of automation by enterprises as part of their IT resiliency initiatives. Retail, manufacturing, and logistics are some of the industries that will be highly dependent on robotics.
- Smarter systems will deliver societal goals. The growing popularity of smarter homes and autonomous vehicles will go a long way in achieving the societal goals of sustainability and environental welfare, as both technology domains hold the promise of lowering of carbon emisssions.
Figure 8: Key Goals for Implementing RPA
Figure 9: Top Corporate Objectives for Robotics
Technology Companies are in a Position of Trust
The survey reveals that the technology industry is at the forefront of the upcoming social and corporate evolution and tech players are expected to deliver positive social impact along with business innovation and enhanced customer experiences. Supporting this is a strong belief and trust in the technology industry. The Omdia Horizons survey highlights that organizations trust technology companies more than their national governments to be effective and ethical. This places such companies in a position of strength as enterprises will rely on them and partner with them to co-create new cutting-edge solutions to deliver sustainable growth.
Our survey asked participants how strongly they agreed or disagreed that technology or governments could be trusted to deliver on business and societal needs, focusing on definitive agreements and disagreements, the depth of trust and belief in technology companies, and the trust in governments. The challenge for governments is to either win the trust of its citizens directly or partner with technology companies to deliver some of the smarter-nation initiatives that are critical in delivery toward achieving the ESG goals.
Figure 10: Level of Trust by Organizations
What Does this Mean for Businesses Today?
The emerging technologies we have investigated have the potential to enable positive change for both corporations and our societies. There is a strong connection in the heads of key influencers and decision makers that societal and business outcomes are strongly linked. Connectivity and education are the foundational technologies for societal and business adaptation over the course of the coming decade. The future will be fast and different. It will be data driven, fully connected, highly automated, and, if we take full advantage of emerging technologies for societal benefit, our activities will be more positively aligned with the environment. Foundational connectivity and education technologies such as 5G and e-learning will amplify the impact of cloud, IoT, edge, and automation.
Businesses and corporations have always needed to invent and reinvent themselves. On the way to 2030, the rate of innovation will increase at a new pace. Governments and enterprises will need to work more efficiently with technology companies to create more innovative products, services, and customer experiences.
However, because of the increasingly recognized alignment between business and society, corporations will be expected to act accordingly. Technology companies will be entrusted to deliver innovation and social impact ethically but must continue to earn that trust through transparent delivery on expectations. During the current decade, the lines between business impact and social impact will continue to blur as will the definitions of customers, partners, and competition. New virtual and human customer types will emerge with ever-increasing real-time needs. Simultaneously serviced by several companies at once, effective user-centric customer experiences will be crucial and will build on automation derived from secure and consent-based data sharing.
