Welcome to the post-digital era

By David Kirwan, managing director – Accenture Technology, Ireland

Companies across industry in Ireland are making steady progress on their digital transformation journeys, using digital technologies to understand customers with new depths of granularity, reach people through more channels, and expand their ecosystems with business partners.

But now they are at a turning point. Digital is no longer a differentiating advantage — it’s the price of admission for doing business here, especially as digital saturation has rapidly evolved people’s expectations and behaviours.

As the 2019 Accenture Technology Vision report explains, we are entering a “post-digital” era, in which businesses must look toward a new generation of technologies to differentiate themselves. But what got companies here today is different from what it will take to succeed in the emerging post-digital era. Already two thirds (66%) of the 100+ Irish business and IT executives we surveyed for the report believe that digital technologies — specifically social, mobile, analytics and cloud — have moved beyond adoption silos to become part of the core technology foundation for their organisation. Globally this is even higher, standing at 79% of the 6,672 businesses and IT executives we surveyed around the world.

The opportunities to lead in this new world won’t come from just establishing a digital business; they will come from how fast companies can move beyond the basics and accelerate their journeys with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality, distributed ledger technology and quantum computing, to name a few.

In fact, 80% of the Irish executives surveyed are experimenting with one or more of these, recognising their potential to unlock extraordinary new capabilities. When asked to rank which of these technologies will have the greatest impact on their organisation over the next three years, 34% of these executives ranked AI number one.

In September 2018, Accenture and the Office of the Revenue Commissioners announced the pilot of a voice-driven Virtual Digital Assistant to provide more streamlined tax-related services to Irish citizens. This solution is powered by AI and uses voice-processing technology to recognise and respond to phone queries about tax clearance certificates and, in some cases, to process applications for those certificates.

The post-digital era.

The post digital word is indeed one where products, services and even people’s surroundings will be highly customised and on-demand. It’s a world where companies will understand people and their goals better than ever before, and they’ll have the agility to move even closer and act “in the moment.” Three in four Irish executives (76%) we surveyed say that the integration of customisation and real-time delivery is the next big wave of creating a competitive advantage. Globally, a staggering six in seven executives (85%) believe in real-time delivery to meet consumers needs at the speed of now.

The real power comes in doing both: hyper-customisation and on-demand together. Take Adidas and Siemens, for example. The two companies are working together to provide customised athletic shoes on demand. Adidas is partnering with Siemens for its engineering experience and software to build what the shoemaker calls a “speedfactory” – an automated manufacturing plant that can create customised shoes at faster speeds and lower costs than traditional methods.

Being able to deliver for specific and constantly changing moments requires a deep level of technology-enabled access into people’s lives. Companies must first earn that level of trust and use it responsibly. This includes addressing the privacy, safety, ethics, and governance questions that come along with this level of technology-enabled access.

Inside organisations, meanwhile, the findings show awareness among senior executives of the slower rate of digital adoption at an organisational level compared to at an individual level. Almost three in four (73%) Irish executives, in line with 71% globally, believe that their employees are more digitally mature than their organisation, resulting in a workforce “waiting” for the organisation to catch up. However, 64% of Irish executives believe that increased employee velocity – the speed at which members of the workforce move between roles and organisations – has increased the need for reskilling in their organisation. When we looked at the global findings, this was four in five executives (78%).

Today companies are rethinking the way they hire, using technology to assess candidates based on capabilities and potential. Almost half of global executives (48%) believe their HR organisation will routinely use AI HR functions for recruiting and hiring within the next two years. Irish executives aren’t far behind with 43% of those surveyed in agreement with this.

For our most recent graduate recruitment campaign in Ireland, Accenture leveraged digital as part of the recruitment process to remove unintentional biases towards candidates, providing a very robust and valid assessment. After an initial online application, candidates received a link to complete an online assessment that comprised a mix of assessments using augmented reality that scored candidates across key capabilities. On the assessment day, we used CAPP Virtual Reality (VR) – the world’s first VR assessment platform – truly immersing candidates into various scenarios to provide fair and level measurement.

Globally, Unilever has revamped its own entry-level hiring process. Interested candidates begin with a screening process that includes a series of short games, designed to assess a person’s potential fit based on traits like memory, acceptance of risk, and whether the person is more likely to read contextual or emotional cues. An AI-based tool reviews the results, eschewing traditional résumé-based evaluation in favour of optimising for potential. There’s no “wrong” result; the trait profiles help Unilever better match candidates to open roles.

The post-digital era will disrupt and entirely reshape business and industries in Ireland and around the world, bringing powerful new capabilities and possibilities. Almost nine in ten (89%) Irish executives – and 94% of executives surveyed globally – report that the pace of innovation in their organisations has accelerated over the past three years due to these emerging technologies. Defining new technology strategies will offer fresh possibilities for companies to build deeper, trust-based relationships and it will offer profound new opportunities to shape how individuals experience the world around them.

The hallmark of successful leaders will be those that take their digital transformation to the next level and set a new series of endgames in their sights.

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