The Singapore Institute of Director’s Annual Conference this year was held virtually and I had the pleasure of being on a panel to talk about how technology and digital transformation is helping customers adjust to the Covid world.
It can be hard to figure out what to say that hasnt already been said. Midway through the circuit breaker, I started working on a a POV with my colleagues on what we think the post Covid world is going to look like but 4 months down the road, I think the solidifying trends are pretty clear. It is no longer about what the trends may be but being willing to recognise what they are and not hope for what used to be and responding accordingly.
I shared two clear statements which I think sum up what companies need to respond to.
The first is employees are not coming back to the office to the extent they were before the pandemic. The second is customers are going to stay online. They have developed new customer behaviours and will not just go back to the old ways of interacting with businesses.
Also had some fun showing examples of some of the digital technologies we get to play with and talk to clients about – PDPR cameras, digital twins, robots and so on. The one I personally really like is the PDPR camera. At a time where surveillance has been increasing worldwide and people are losing some of their freedom and privacy, in part due to the need to contact trace and contain the pandemic, there are many ways that technologies can be smartly designed to protect privacy and prevent unnecessary intrusion into people’s lives. Privacy by design can also be good for business as well, common commercial video analytics use cases often do not need to massively collect facial images, saving the need to invest in higher capacity hardware, bandwidth and storage.
Digital Optimist 