THE MORE DIGITAL, THE MORE HUMAN

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More than 80% of entrepreneurship in the last two years has been digital, new, disruptive and changing. The big difference is not only the speed of creation and adaptation, but also the absence of organic evolution from the mainstream market: they are new products, new players. In this environment, digital platforms stand out as one of the great changes of our time. It goes without saying that there is nothing “digital” that is not “human” because technology companies are no different than people serving people through technology.

Little do we realize the extent of this change -- it is the rescue or discovery and development of new markets. that we can summarize under the generic term of “neglected sectors”. With this, we are not only referring to sectors of the population that large corporations do not see as their customer niche, but also specific products for certain groups of people, new channels or additions to those that already existed.

Easy example: ?few years ago, people had postal mailboxes (P.O. Boxes) where they received their mail, parcels, or packages. It was like this for a long time, be it for comfort, access to goods produced in foreign markets, privacy or just because they did not have where to receive it. Today, there are less letters that are physically crossed and the providers have been in charge of taking the packages – even free – to their final destination. For a large supplier that does not wholesale, the B2C business in general, this is not only expensive but also logistically complex. Given that unattended need, "last mile" logistics companies have now been born, they add value to these suppliers to efficiently take care of bringing the products to the consumer's home from their collection centers.

In the case of the financial services sector, the lower middle class and small and medium-sized companies were not profitable for the banks that were looking for large capitals and large transactions. Today there are hundreds of credit companies that, through cards, payment systems or simple investment platform, can profitably serve this segment, "taking away" the monopoly of traditional banks, with very little regulation.

Entrepreneurship seeks to create, together with technology, new needs and new solutions for those that are not met. They do not require climbing the steep learning curve, but investment funds select the projects that interest them most and invest in them in numerous rounds and with different values with the purpose of later selling, merging or converting them into public companies to recover their investment.

Half a century ago, the big banks supported by foreign and public capital dominated the race, mass production and consumer companies quoted their ups and downs on the stock market. Today those companies – for the most part – subsist. Although they do not compete in the size of their income, they do compete in their profitability, where the smallest grow rapidly and attract money from savers and investors with a higher risk but a much higher return in the short term.

This happens, naturally, within a volatile and uncertain environment. A small sample: the term to become a company of the so-called "Fortune 500" has been reduced by 36% in the last 5 years, some have achieved it in less than 18 months. The term to stop being one has been reduced by 39%. Only 49 companies have been on the list since it was created in 1955, and 2,022 have been there at some time.

In the same way that the industrial revolution changed the way in which the world operated, and the vision of the human being in this new scaffolding, this digital revolution has generated and will generate profound changes, particularly in the interface between individuals. But there is a fundamental difference, and it is that the change of the status quo will add to the value of people instead of subtracting it.

The industrial revolution came to replace human labor, the digital revolution, on the contrary, to strengthen it. While the "machine" generically speaking was substitutive in its essence, digitalization is accretive, it adds up.

If it were seen as a substitute process,, we would simply be facing the elimination of repetitive tasks that algorithms will be able to do today and tomorrow. But in the same way that the printing press multiplied reading and did not replace writing, digitization will allow us to find more human spaces, tasks and jobs that are not substitutable and this implies the development of skills more associated with being than doing.

It is undoubtedly the most humanistic of the breaks with the status quo, and one that will put the human being at the center of industrial, social and business discussion. The future is digital, and therefore deeply human.