David Blumberg, founder and managing partner at Blumberg Capital, based in San Francisco, says that “companies that leverage digital technologies to automate the white collar economy will generate the biggest impact.”
This will happen as a result of the convergence of big data and artificial intelligence and integrating IT “more deeply and broadly into healthcare, transforming the automotive industry from product to service, democratizing financial services, building data businesses with rising barriers to entry, orchestrating and simplifying cybersecurity operations and innovating in new domains such as deep tech, IoT and drones,” Blumberg says.
At Webber Innovation, we focus on how the functional maturity of cloud, blockchain, and AI empowers organizations of all types to create truly innovative platform-driven business models.
CLOUD
Cloud is now a mandate, not an option, but there is still much to do to leverage the transformative potential of cloud services. Cloud is not just a like-for-like replacement for existing on-premises data centers. A thoughtful cloud strategy migrates, modernizes, operates, and optimizes with a cloud-first mindset and often a hybrid multicloud implementation. A good place to start is often shutting down idle infrastructure and focusing on sophisticated application modernization.
BLOCKCHAIN
With blockchain, developers can create smart contracts or decentralized applications, explore peer-to-peer payment systems or crowdfunding, or leverage blockchain for identity management. Although blockchain’s inception was in the realm of cryptocurrency, its technology allows data to be shared, but not copied, and its total database is distributed in blocks. This distributed ledger cultivates greater transparency, decentralization, and security. Between 2018 and 2019, Blockchain leaped into the top-five strategic priorities for organizations, according to Deloitte, a jump of 10 percentage points in a year.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI parses massive datasets humans could never hope to. In the digital age, AI represents a strong way to leverage latent data into actionable data for a competitive edge. AI and machine learning have made significant leaps forward in the financial industry, empowering customer engagement, helping manage portfolios, scenario planning for institutions’ own long-term strategies, and operational improvements. AI is also reducing drug development time, in 2019 allowing one biotech startup to develop a drug from molecular design to initial testing in 46 days (compared to the average decade and $350mm-$2.7bn it usually costs to bring a new drug to market). In general, AI allows higher levels of personalization, productivity, and creativity that shape business.