When atoms meet bits, businesses prepare for our new reality

Today we launched the Accenture Technology Vision 2023, the latest in our annual forecasts of the most important trends that will shape the future of business.?I’m particularly excited about this year's outlook: technology is helping drive a future where atoms meet bits, shaping a new reality for business and radically new opportunities for leaders.

So what’s different in a world where atoms meet bits?

Today, the digital world (bits) and physical world (atoms) generally work in parallel. We either shop at a store or go online. We work in person, or we work remote. We collaborate with people and computers, but usually not at the same time. We make conscious, sometimes cumbersome, efforts to move between our separate realities of atoms and bits.

We believe the time has come to change that. The next wave of business transformation – defined by cloud, metaverse and AI – will erase the demarcation between those worlds to fuse them into a new shared reality, where the atoms of the physical world work directly with the bits of the digital world. The next stage of digital revolution must bring the digital and the physical together.

This convergence is already underway. The metaverse continuum is transforming manufacturing. Products are starting to be conceived with digital twins from the outset – a shift that transforms the entire value chain. When we stop thinking of manufacturing as a physical process alone, but one with a digital twin fused throughout, new capabilities emerge like rapid product iteration to respond in real time to customer feedback, the ease of integrating new additive manufacturing techniques, or even enabling AR applications like product testing or expert training. All made possible because we no longer think of a product as “just” a physical thing, but one that threads between the digital and physical.??

Now we are tracking the rise of ChatGPT and other large language models which have captivated the world’s attention on the power of generative AI to augment human capability, a key aspect of this new shared reality. We estimate as much as 40% of all working hours will be supported or augmented by language-based AI. And among business leaders, 98% of respondents agree AI foundation models will play an important role in their organization’s strategies over the next three to five years.

With the power of human ingenuity and the capabilities of AI, the possibilities are becoming astounding - as we reach the limits of Moore's Law, we are entering a new era in which human intelligence and skills will grow at an exponential pace. Some language models have already been trained on protein folding, and other biological and chemical processes which, when combined with human ingenuity, herald a future of accelerated drug discovery, personalized medicine, and the ignition of a science technology revolution.

As enterprises navigate uncertain economic and political times, the natural inclination of many organizations is to pull back. The world will only become more complex, and the way businesses will navigate this will be through technology-driven reinvention which will give them the necessary agility to reach new performance frontiers.

Today all business strategies lead to technology, making it essential that each company become a technology company in order to drive total enterprise reinvention and not just manage through exponential change, but capitalize on it.

Accenture’s Technology Vision 2023 identifies four trends that are key to unlocking this new shared reality:

• Generative AI: Advancing human capability as a co-pilot, creative partner or advisor, nearly all executives agree that generative AI will spark significant creativity and innovation (98%) and usher in a new era of enterprise intelligence (95%).
• Digital identity: The ability to authenticate digital users and assets—the foundation for traversing digital and physical worlds—is now seen by 85% of executives as a strategic business imperative, not just a technical issue.
• My data, your data, our data: AI cannot reach its full potential until companies figure out data. That means breaking down data silos and modernizing their data foundations. In fact, 90% of executives believe data is becoming a key competitive differentiator within organizations and across industries.
• Our forever frontier: Feedback loop between science and technology is getting faster, with each accelerating the advancement of the other, in ways that 75% of respondents believe could begin to unlock the world’s grand challenges.

Against that backdrop, our Technology Vision provides insights to enable leaders and their organizations to act now to embrace technology and use these foundations of a new reality as a path towards reinvention. The goal is not incremental improvement, but a total reinvention.

Leaders must ask themselves five questions to help them prepare for a future where the movement between worlds is seamless and often simultaneous.

It's time for leaders to take advantage now of the next great changes in technology to build foundations of a new reality. Leaders don't wait for the future to happen; they make sure are among the first - if not the first - to get there.

To quote my hero Neil Stephenson: “See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places.” I invite you to catch the ride with us and shape a future of atoms and bits.