EMBRACING THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (4IR), BUT ALWAYS PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST

In a data-driven world, how will corporate strategies be redefined by humans' increasing interaction with intelligent technology?

So much has been said and written about the future agile workforce, to power up organisations’ transformation in order to fulfill the needs of digitally-savvy and increasingly mobile-centric customers. In 2014, CIMB introduced Target 18 (or T18 for short), our mid-term growth plan, which even then already had the digital theme underlying many of our18 projects, like Digital Banking, Data Management, FinTech and Branch Productivity.

However, even as we began to execute T18, we’ve had to tweak many of our digitally-based projects to adapt to the fast changing environment. Fast forward four years, the 4IR tenets are being much more embedded in our decision making process including for our next mid-term growth plan for beyond T18. We are currently more focused than ever on digitising our core in terms of our capabilities, operating model, as well as IT delivery and architecture.

Whilst all those are important, to me one crucial component is on how we equip our future workforce with the right knowledge and capabilities to help propel the group’s next growth phase. In the face of increasingly sophisticated technology, for example AI, if applied from within, could prove to be banks' biggest threat. Unfortunately, the realm of unknowns and possibilities for the future is currently too vast for a 100% spot-on prescription on how the future workforce should be conceptualized, shaped, moulded and trained. But we can begin by asking questions like:

• Are we able to predict what future jobs will look like, and to properly define agility and adaptability? Are we training our youth for the job of tomorrow? Do they know the challenges they will face? Without defining what these are, it would be difficult to craft the right educational and training curricula. To do this successfully, companies need to deliberate on their long term objectives including the type of company they want to be in the future. We can look at companies such as Google or Alibaba for inspiration, and to study the composition of their workforce, so that we can have the correct basis for strategic workforce planning. And in doing so, we must have the courage to acknowledge that both low- and high-skilled workers (even CEO's like me!) may have to work alongside robots or the likes of Amazon's Alexa - all programmed to get more intelligent every second. We have to ask then, how will embracing technology transform the organisational structure in terms of governance and compliance, and HR and business strategies? This requires not just some serious thinking, but also plenty of corporate soul searching.
• Who is responsible for creating the ecosystem to nurture future talent? The Government through their human resource and education ministries? Or the private sector? One under-tapped potential in ASEAN is better public-private sector collaboration, especially in tertiary education curriculum-setting, to ensure graduates’ skills will match industry’s future needs. In Malaysia, we already have some well-structured initiatives, such as those by the Next Academy, to train world class junior developers in Southeast Asia. Many tech companies in the private sector have also organized coding campaigns, or big data/analytics courses, to partly fill up the gap in nurturing future talent. CIMB itself truly believes in the benefits of 4IR and the data narrative. In 2016, we started our Data Science Challenge to get undergraduates excited on how we slice, dice and analyse data to deliver better value to society. But all these are piecemeal initiatives. There should ideally be a comprehensive policy on public-private partnerships’ including a revamp of and investment in tertiary education curricula. And in doing this, instead of worrying about how many human jobs will be lost, both the public and private sectors should instead focus on creating the right ecosystem for humans to thrive in other ways, e.g., by enabling them to spend more time on critical thinking and reflecting, as opposed to executing mechanical tasks.   
• Are corporates doing and spending enough to ensure that their staff are being trained to remain relevant? Being an agile business also means infusing agility into our talent-sourcing strategies, so that we can have access to the right skills at the right time. Reskilling existing workforce to embed an agile and adaptable mindset might be easier said than done, but it is not impossible. In terms of remaining relevant, I should add that at least for now, AI, robotics and automation cannot (yet) replicate humans' social and emotional capabilities, as well as the subtler nuances of human communications and creativity, which support humans' continued relevance. And who knows? Technology could also make all of us more human. But hyper-intelligent robots with emotions and advanced cognitive skills could actually happen sooner rather than later, and it is still unclear on how this will change the dynamics of HR and other corporate strategies.  
• How can we incorporate capabilities like AI, robotics and blockchain technology effectively to take on repetitive, mundane tasks, so our workforce can focus more on strategic and critical thinking? For our world with limited resources and a sharp global population growth, it is not possible to automate and robotize whole ecosystems all at once, although this end-game is crucial for companies to remain relevant in the future. However, my opinion is that even with a blend of in-house capacity-building, partnerships and acquisitions of FinTechs, companies may not even achieve their full capacity to automate and robotize, given how quickly advancements in AI, blockchain, robotics etc., occur. But try, we must!  

From all of the above, though, one thing is clear: to effectively change the face of a business, companies must begin to look at ‘talent’ differently, which in the future may consist of not just employees, but also robots/ automation, regardless of industry. Banking could be one of those industries suited for such a formula.

Nevertheless, even as companies digitise their organizations and the customer journey, and formulating various ‘talent formulae’, it is extremely important to prioritise people.

One way we prioritise our people is by digitising #teamCIMB, and this will happen through our CIMB 3D (Data-Digital-Disruption) Academy. We have committed RM75 million in the next three years to equip our 36,000-strong workforce with digital knowledge and skills appropriate to their jobs. We will enhance the digital quotient in all job roles; enable the Group’s digital transformation; and build an agile, innovative, tech-savvy workforce with the agility, adaptability, creativity and an open mind to, among others, think like an entrepreneur and disrupt conventional thinking.

At the heart of all this is, of course, our aim to make CIMB the most powerful incubator possible for the development of talent, both human and non-human, to propel our next growth phase. We believe that in a data-driven world, we can only create more great things when digitally-minded humans intersect and interact consistently with technology.