This is the consensus view of an MIT Technology Review Insights survey of 210 members of technology executives, conducted in March 2021. These respondents report that they need—and still often lack— the ability to develop new digital channels and services quickly, and to optimize them in real time.
Underpinning these waves of digital transformation are two fundamental drivers: the ability to serve and understand customers better, and the need to increase employees’ ability to work more effectively toward those goals.
Two-thirds of respondents indicated that more efficient customer experience delivery was the most critical objective. This was followed closely by the use of analytics and insight to improve products and services (60%). Increasing team collaboration and communication, and increasing security of digital assets and intellectual property came in joint third, with around 55% each.
All the digital objectives are integrally linked to improving customer and employee engagement, retention, and activation. Richard Jefts, vice president and general manager of HCL’s Digital Solutions, notes that increasing team collaboration and communication received additional attention over the last year.
“With covid-19, management teams needed to ensure that business could continue remotely, which has meant new levels of adoption of collaboration capabilities and the use of the low code by employees to digitize business processes to bridge the gaps,” says Jefts.
Miao Song, Brussels-based chief information officer of Mars Petcare, notes that digitalization has been steadily redefining her company’s global pet nutrition and veterinary services businesses. “Our online business has seen double-digit growth, and the resulting volume of customer data allows us to forecast demand better,” says Song.
Digital tools also allow more and better market data to be gathered and utilized quickly. Song points out that AI-enabled image recognition tools are being used by Mars’ sales reps to scan retailers’ shelves and generate insight for better inventory management.
As Mars’ reliance on AI and analytics is increasing throughout the organization, it is teaching many employees to use low-code tools to bolster their internal capabilities. Low code is a software development approach that requires little to no coding to build applications and processes, allowing users with no formal knowledge of coding or software development to create applications.
“Everybody in our company needs to become a data analyst—not just IT team members,” says Song, speaking of Mars’ efforts to increase digital literacy in a bid to enhance visibility across the company’s supply chain, refine pricing strategies, and develop new products and services.
Song notes that promoting the use of low-code development tools through hackathons and other activities has been an important part of Mars’ efforts: “we need to break the notion that only IT can access and use our data resources,” she adds.
Customer experience is (still) king
Survey respondents have indicated that they have already seen significantly increased performance in customer experience processes since undertaking digital transformation efforts. Moving into the coming year, customer experience continues to be a priority.
Respondents are seeking to improve digital channels in particular, followed by analytics and to support personalization, and AI or automated customer engagement tools. Other digital competencies are being built to accommodate changes in customer and partner expectations and requirements, streamlining customer experience processes by delivering multi-experience capabilities.
Alan Pritchard, director of ICT Services for Austin Health, a public hospital group based in Melbourne, Australia, explains that his company’s digital transformation process began to accelerate well before covid-19’s impact set in.
“A model of service review in 2019 identified home-based monitoring and home-based care as critical to our future service delivery—so even prior to the pandemic, our health strategy was focused on improving digital channels and increasing our capacity to support people outside of the hospital,” says Pritchard, noting that in order to execute on Austin Health’s outreach strategy, a common customer relationship management (CRM) platform needed to be built.
“While some future service models can be delivered with telehealth initiatives or with device integration, there’s still a lot of work to do looking at how you communicate electronically with people about their health status,” says Pritchard.
The organization’s common CRM platform needed to accommodate numerous autonomous specialty departments, “and each of them wants their own app to communicate electronically with their patients,” observes Pritchard.
Managing numerous separate app development processes is complex, although “there are common patterns in how departments engage with patients in appointment booking, preparation, and follow-up processes”, says Pritchard, “so we need a platform that’s highly reusable, rather than a series of apps built on custom code.”
This, coupled with the need to distribute some control and customization through the multiple departments, led Prichard’s team down a low-code path.
This largely correlates with the experiences of our survey cohort: over 75% of respondents indicate that they have increased their use of digital development platforms (including low code), and over 80% have increased their investment priorities in workflow management tools over the last year.
The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to ancient microbiomes as possible, microbiologists have begun studying multiple Indigenous groups. Two have received the most attention: the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest and the Hadza, in northern Tanzania.
Researchers have made some startling discoveries already. A study by Sonnenburg and his colleagues, published in July, found that the gut microbiomes of the Hadza appear to include bugs that aren’t seen elsewhere—around 20% of the microbe genomes identified had not been recorded in a global catalogue of over 200,000 such genomes. The researchers found 8.4 million protein families in the guts of the 167 Hadza people they studied. Over half of them had not previously been identified in the human gut.
Plenty of other studies published in the last decade or so have helped build a picture of how the diets and lifestyles of hunter-gatherer societies influence the microbiome, and scientists have speculated on what this means for those living in more industrialized societies. But these revelations have come at a price.
A changing way of life
The Hadza people hunt wild animals and forage for fruit and honey. “We still live the ancient way of life, with arrows and old knives,” says Mangola, who works with the Olanakwe Community Fund to support education and economic projects for the Hadza. Hunters seek out food in the bush, which might include baboons, vervet monkeys, guinea fowl, kudu, porcupines, or dik-dik. Gatherers collect fruits, vegetables, and honey.
Mangola, who has met with multiple scientists over the years and participated in many research projects, has witnessed firsthand the impact of such research on his community. Much of it has been positive. But not all researchers act thoughtfully and ethically, he says, and some have exploited or harmed the community.
One enduring problem, says Mangola, is that scientists have tended to come and study the Hadza without properly explaining their research or their results. They arrive from Europe or the US, accompanied by guides, and collect feces, blood, hair, and other biological samples. Often, the people giving up these samples don’t know what they will be used for, says Mangola. Scientists get their results and publish them without returning to share them. “You tell the world [what you’ve discovered]—why can’t you come back to Tanzania to tell the Hadza?” asks Mangola. “It would bring meaning and excitement to the community,” he says.
Some scientists have talked about the Hadza as if they were living fossils, says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist and biologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who has been studying and working with the Hadza for the last two decades.
The Hadza have been described as being “locked in time,” she adds, but characterizations like that don’t reflect reality. She has made many trips to Tanzania and seen for herself how life has changed. Tourists flock to the region. Roads have been built. Charities have helped the Hadza secure land rights. Mangola went abroad for his education: he has a law degree and a master’s from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona.
Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.
Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost.
But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation
—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures
The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.
Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.
According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.
Mapping out a generative AI pathway
One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.
The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.
Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.
All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.
The benefits of third-party experience
Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).
Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”
