In recent years, our economy has undergone a rapid transformation toward an on-demand model. With the introduction of smartphones and apps like Airbnb and Uber, people have been granted unprecedented access to giving feedback on products and services. As a result, consumers have been brought upstream into the product development life cycle and now expect businesses to bend to their needs.
This consumer shift has set the stage for what is to come in the enterprise. New technologies — such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and apps in the cloud and on the edge — are radically transforming the workplace. In the near future, we’ll see the demand for instant gratification and access to information intensify even more. On-demand is no longer just a gimmick; it’s a reality. As the dust on these changes settles, a new real-time economy will emerge.
For businesses to succeed in this changing technological landscape, charting a course from on-demand to real time could be widely beneficial. To get you started, here’s a glimpse of what the real-time economy could look like:
Masters Of Our Universe
Consumers were once happy to get services and information at the click of a button. But as we move toward a real-time economy, they may demand an even faster experience, and they’ll expect conversational and intelligent communication to come with their technology.
For example, just a few years ago, consumers didn’t think twice about going to a restaurant in person. Over the past decade, they’ve shifted to expecting on-demand sushi through apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash. Soon enough, consumers won’t want to punch their credit card numbers into a phone and swipe through options. They’ll want to use voice or AR technology to order instantaneously without the friction of a phone screen.
They’ll trust your business to remember their preferences and even help make decisions. This goes beyond the algorithms we use today that push ads and movie choices based on your past browsing history. The real-time equivalent could have a knowledge graph of every consumer — which will require a new level of trust with companies.
This applies to the enterprise as well. To access data, businesses once needed to manually sort through files. Now, Google Drive and the cloud make it easy to search for information. But as the world transitions to real time, companies may need to find ways to make data instantaneously available in all settings, whether at a desk or on a walk through the park. This means your company’s customer knowledge graph could explode with more data, but its expectations of privacy will increase as well. How accessible and trustworthy your product is could be just as important as the product itself.
An Interface Revolution
Over the past 30 years, the way we interact with technology has undergone several significant transformations. The human-to-machine interface has moved from paper and punch cards to personal computers and, eventually, mobile devices and touchscreens. As the world reorients toward a real-time dynamic, the interface is going to change again. We’ll break free of the confines of the screen and move toward intuitive interaction with spatial and conversational interfaces, redefining how we engage with digital processes and information.
Spatial computing — which uses technologies like game engines and real-world sensing to overlay data in our physical environment — may eventually replace tangible interfaces. This could bridge the physical and digital worlds into one continuous experience, forming a symbiotic relationship between humans and computers and allowing people to communicate with technology through natural interactions like gaze, gesture and voice.
Consumers’ trust in the companies they interact with will be paramount to turning this idea into a reality. Trust could become central to creating the next trillion-dollar company and is one of the biggest areas for innovation over the next decade. With deepfakes, privacy breaches and accounts with unlimited access to our lives, authenticity and trust may very well become some of the most important focus areas for any company looking to innovate and could likely play a primary role in unlocking the real-time economy.
A World Powered By Intelligence
In order to meet the demand for real-time experience and integrate spatial computing into day-to-day business, companies may need different kinds of resources than what they have today. Businesses are already using AI for a variety of purposes. But by 2022, the World Economic Forum predicts, 42% of work will be done by machines. In comparison, machines are currently responsible for only 29% of work.
In order to offer products and services at the drop of a hat, companies could ramp up their adoption of AI, voice recognition and the cloud to increase access to information and products. Eventually, users may expect their experience to automatically adjust based on the context of what they are doing in the physical world. This could take years of innovation, but once achieved, it could enable remote and distributed work.
To move toward this new model, I recommend business leaders do the following:
• Hire a chief integrity officer who will oversee areas of the business such as privacy, ethics in AI and compliance.
• Invest in future work technologies such as VR, mixed reality and voice recognition to move away from traditional interfaces.
• Prioritize soft-skills training to increase the quality of your customer interactions.
• Reinvent how work gets bundled into jobs, and create optimal human-machine combinations.
Shifting consumer demands, the rise of spatial computing interfaces and the heightened availability of advanced technologies such as AI, VR, augmented reality and mixed reality could move businesses from an on-demand to real-time model. This shift may very well underline and empower technology’s relationship with consumers and the workforce. We expect the lines between the physical and digital worlds to blur in the coming years as spatial computing features and functions transcend the boundaries of headsets and make their way into storefronts, interfaces in our cars and homes, and elsewhere in our lives. Convenience is no longer the killer feature. Trust is.