Business in the Time of 'Techquillibrium'

2020 will bring the realization that smart technologies like - AI - is an augmenter, rather than a threat to human capital. Here's my take on the three trends that will drive significant disruptions and opportunities in the tech world.

The world feels surreal, like science fiction. Given what we are talking about today – chips to augment the brain and sensors to track how drugs travel inside our body - technology is undoubtedly on the cusp of surfacing our superhuman capabilities. 2019 has been the year our best selves have been unleashed. Consider the proliferation of certain job categories – artificial intelligence (AI) architects, Data Scientists, etc. and the places technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are going – from enhancing MMO gaming to enabling huge leaps in marketing, training, and even medical science. 

2020 will bring the realization that smart technologies like - AI - is an augmenter, rather than a threat to human capital. Here are three trends that will drive significant disruptions and opportunities.

#1 Humanization of smart tech

Global research and advisory firm Gartner places hyperautomation - the application of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to increasingly automate processes and augment humans - on top of its list of the 10 strategic technology trends for 2020. 

What’s very interesting and even encouraging is that the report classifies these trends as “people-centric,” implying that every technology stack of the future will have to be built based on the consideration of the human context.

For a company like Intuit which believes in humanizing our technology – this reaffirms our strategy. Our years of experience in dealing with people’s money matters have taught us that finances are more than numbers on a screen. With technology architecture trending towards more empathy for users, 2020 will be the year when the unfounded narrative around technology being a threat to humans will be busted.

And that’s good news for us who are incorporating smart people through a human-in-the-loop platform to unlock any expertise a user needs. An example is how we are connecting our customers to credible, vetted financial experts on our secure platform. Another is our use of natural language processing (NLP) to detect and inject emotions within our automated customer care and product experiences. We analyze sentiment and tone in words and speech, to respond to our customers in a way that is appropriate for their emotional state.

#2 Focusing on the ‘Humans of start-ups’

The start-up landscape looks bright. The Indian Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology along with McKinsey state that India can create over $1 trillion of economic value from the digital economy by 2025 and start-ups will be at the forefront of pushing the next wave of the digital economy. This positive outlook will encourage a greater number of technology companies to intensify their focus on this ecosystem and co-innovate with start-ups in the digital space. 

It is this buoyancy that motivated us to launch Intuit Circles, our start-up ecosystem engagement initiative, a year ago. Today with 2000 startups as part of this growing network, we are successfully creating avenues for co-innovating by building API integrations with the Intuit products and helping the start-ups gain access to millions of our customers globally.

In 2020, the corporate-startup engagement strategies will further mature where the focus will shift from the excessive attention to the business aspect of start-ups to the ‘human’ aspect. India continues to occupy its position as the world’s third largest start-up ecosystem with greater than a thousand start-ups launching every year and a growing number of Unicorns.  These upbeat patterns will persuade corporates to engage more with the entrepreneurs to understand their leadership and business skills, and how these skills can be a catalyst to greater opportunities for co-creating products and services.     

#3 Advanced asks by advanced users of public cloud

Another space that will witness a significant amount of innovation is the public cloud landscape. It is interesting how the market will reshape itself based on asks from the users – who are more informed today, have moved beyond the cloud adoption phase and hence are expecting greater role from public cloud in their success. 

For instance, Intuit has been betting big on public cloud and quite successfully so - having moved all our major products and ~400 applications, complex framework and highly sensitive information to the public could.  

We are now looking at leveraging the flexibility and advanced services of the public cloud to accelerate our innovation velocity where we can experiment faster, roll out features with greater ease, and gain deeper insights with data analytics and data science. This underscores that businesses will continue to rely on public could and hence there will be rapid innovation in this space as consumption goes up. 

This will result in new cloud alliances – like IBM's acquisition of Red Hat and Oracle's partnership with Microsoft – shifting focus from cloud provider space to the development platform space.

Securing data in the public cloud will also be a huge ask from users. After the breach of data at the US bank Capital One, the industry woke up to the need for a stronger cloud security management. This will intensify deployment of advanced security systems such as cloud workload security (CWS), cloud security gateways, micro-segmentation, encryption, security analytics, threat intelligence, endpoint detection, and response, etc.

Wherever the future may lead us, I’d say finding the right equilibrium is the best way to stay on top of the changing tides. New doesn’t mean the undoing of the old, it’s rather an opportunity to finetune what’s been built while ensuring that the different parties we work with - employees, customers, partners, and shareholders – prosper all along. Gartner has coined a very interesting term to describe the time we live in – ‘techquillibrium.’ It indicates the synergy we need to find between legacy systems and the emerging tech stack. To me, this term is a philosophy guiding us on how to let the old co-exist with the new.  

This article was first published in the January 2020 issue of Entrepreneur India magazine.