Why will Digital Technologies Witness a New Dawn Post Covid-19?

The next stage of digital evolution welcomes us with the promise of emotionally intelligent interfaces and intelligent cognitive capabilities that would usher a new business era. As a preparation for the coming decade of disruptive change, businesses will witness an increased adoption to digital technologies that would register a spike post-COVID-19. While CXOs face a constant challenge to keep up with the pace of technological advancements, a comprehensive success demands the perfect marriage between digital transformation and change management.

Digital Technologies like digital intelligence or Digital IQ will see new takers. These intelligent solutions would assist enterprises by optimizing automation initiatives and complementing platforms like business process management and robotic process automation. Circa 2021 would witness more and more enterprises adopting digital intelligence technologies into their digital transformation initiatives.

Deep learning is imperative to the development threshold of AI technology improving the quality and efficiency of AI applications. Deep learning algorithms will be applied across multi-disciplinaries at a scale to accelerate transformation, and implement innovation.

3D image processing will steadily grow along with machine vision. 3-D vision would find its deployment in more targeted applications like high-speed imaging, surface profiling and robot guidance which require extremely accurate and reliable 3D images. Post Covid-19 era would channelise a new technological collaboration where two or more digital technologies would co-exist to offer greater organisational value. Take for instance thermal vision traditionally used for security, public safety and defence would integrate with computer vision to offer distinctive imaging which cannot be seen by the eye or standard camera systems.

Covid-19 will bring a business transformation forcing businesses to rethink their long-term planning. According to the IDC, digital workers like software robots and cognitive bots would witness a growth of over 50% by 2022. Enterprises will welcome digital robots willing to take up rule-based tasks in the office. Employees across geographies will collaborate with digital workers working alongside them in the future. The new dawn will ascertain that business adapts to new disruptive technologies; sensor-based IoT devices in particular. According to another report by IDC, investments in IoT technology would touch the magical figure of US$1 trillion by the end of this year. A clear indication of the anticipated growth in smart and connected devices.

Industry 4.0 and IoT will be at the nucleus of new technological approaches for development, production, and management of industries across domains. Massive shifts in industries after the Covid-19 scare requires them to adopt agile, smarter, and innovative ways to advance production and augment human labour with robotics reducing any instances of industrial accidents of the future.

Another promising technology would be Robotic Process Automation (RPA) a poster boy of technology which has of late caught business attention.

An RPA deployment is more than just automation and replacing people with technology rather involves process design critical to bring digital transformation within a business strategy. These RPA teams must go beyond producing bots for the business to effectively address business concerns around change-management efforts and service level agreements (SLAs), tracking bot performance against business goals to communicate additional requirements for a smooth automation transition across enterprises.

As we move forward, the need of the hour is prudent leaders who have a clear vision of the future that comes with realistic expectations based on a deep understanding of technology. Transformational business leaders must distinguish wins from full-scale technology implementations and keep their teams motivated to drive strategic outcomes.