By Pablo Muñoz, R/GA Buenos Aires, Business Development Director
The rise of digital technologies marked the beginning of a Third Industrial Revolution. Interactions among users and platforms that take place in an instant have opened opportunities for innovation that were unthinkable just a few years ago. Humanity has previously gone through similar periods of radical change, with the First and Second Industrial Revolutions ushering in standardized processes, new machinery, and newer sources of energy that enabled the manufacture of goods with a scale and efficiency never seen before.
The connectivity brought about by the digital transformation era demanded rethinking business models and creating completely new ones including Amazon, Apple, Uber, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and a long list of disruptors made for a digital world. The age of digital transformation has paved the way for the Fourth industrial revolution, also known as i4.0, 4IR, or Industry 4.0.
We are living in an era where the speed of transformation, the impact of changes, and the interrelation between emerging technologies is creating challenges and opportunities that demand we rethink not only business models, but also collaborative and organizational dynamics.
The combination of AI, IoT, Big Data, Cloud infrastructure, mixed reality (AR+VR), and blockchain is increasingly erasing the line between the physical and digital world. This implies that those industries that are still grappling with the challenges posed by digitization’ must accelerate their rate of change — or prepare to find themselves becoming irrelevant and obsolete.
But this challenging landscape also applies to those companies that were born digital. Today, digitization is not the finish line. It is the starting point. Without adopting an integrated approach to how these technologies leverage a deeper understanding of people, there is literally a world that is left untapped.
Driven by the interconnection among technological developments, i4.0 brings a qualitative change rather than only a quantitative one. The three previous industrial revolutions were mainly characterized by the effects of scale: improvements in efficiency, distribution, and communications-enabled reaching more people through products and services standardization.
Today, the challenge is not only to reach those consumers but to do so with an individualized value proposal. The intersection of technologies provides access to information about users’ habits, preferences, and behaviors that enables a continuous iteration and improvement in the design and offering of products or services at an individual level.
It is now possible to gather data about a person in a specific time and place almost instantaneously and to generate an interaction based on that information. The interrelation between our activities in the physical world and our digital devices challenge us to reimagine traditional services as ecosystems, designing holistic solutions around people’s needs and habits. It’s integrating our products and services with other solutions that will make them not only relevant and useful, but a habit to be acquired among users. The key is how individualized and personalized our offering can be without breaching privacy guardrails
Therefore, i4.0 challenges us to develop increasingly robust products and services to meet people’s ever-higher expectations; to adopt increasingly collaborative innovation practices; and to rethink the organizational culture.
With the battle for efficiency and scale already won, i4.0 invites us to envision interconnected ecosystems nurtured by wearable technology devices, big data engines, and artificial intelligence, all focused on creating individualized products and services. The intelligence provided by robust data platforms that synthesize dispersed knowledge should guide the design of these new experiences.
The adoption of multidisciplinary teams and collaborative methodologies will be crucial to make this new world a more human, sustainable ecosystem that works for all — bridging the digital divide to create access to its benefits for us. The challenge requires us to challenge assumptions, think beyond what’s possible today — and adopt a holistic perspective that might enable us to imagine a brighter tomorrow.
