The pace of change is the slowest it will ever be.

This has been a year of tremendous change. The pandemic has challenged and transformed so many business models – from telehealth in medicine to curbside pickups in retail, from connected supply chains in consumer goods to remote working for many of us - we are experiencing years of digital transformation in months. But as clear and vivid that pace of change has been, the reality is that it’s the slowest it is ever going to be.

History shows us how earlier industrial revolutions intersected with calamities to setup foundational changes that transformed societies. London’s cholera epidemic laid the development of a sewer system that ultimately helped it scale to a megapolis of culture, commerce and international finance. The outbreak of yellow fever helped create Paris’s network of open spaces that has left the city with the beautiful backdrop for the romantic city its come to be.

For us this year has ushered in a platform for tremendous change – change that is built on three converging technology streams and is fueled by a transformation appetite born out of post-pandemic necessity. I spent the year collaborating closely with digital and technology officers of large corporations we are fortunate to have the chance to work with. And across the work we do, these three foundational trends are as easy to spot, as they are challenging to deploy. 

Hyper-automation. Cloud, composable services and AI are coming together to address the last mile of our automation backbone. Cloud has evolved from a scalability and productivity nice-to-have into a modernization and simplification must-do, and cloud-first has evolved into cloud-smart strategy for most corporations across the world. Composable services provide building blocks from a much larger innovation ecosystem than before, enabling the assembly - not build, of new capability in a fast and agile manner. And in many fields of application that are at or above-human grade predictability, AI is finding applications we never saw possible before. All of this is modernizing the technical backbone upon which the businesses of tomorrow can now deliver.

Data-economy. The one thing about data that stands out across the corporate world is that it has gone from being a collateral asset to becoming a first class citizen. Data insights are now driving fundamental changes in business models. And data strategy – the work of cataloging and structuring the data, managing its lineage and architecture, and cyber-securing, governing and regulating its use, is now on board agendas of corporations across the globe. Alongside, the advances we have seen, from instrumenting the telemetry across connected ecosystems to the neural net models that help us identify weak links and build accurate prediction machines, are fast accelerating the large and real benefits we accrue from this.

Future-of-work. The clearest view we have of the future of work is that its here today. Remote working has had us re-think the very blueprint of work – what we automate, how we distribute and collaborate, and how we innovate. Experience has become the true north for transformation efforts as we use digital stickiness to drive resilience and growth in business models. And the advancing man-machine frontier has brought focus on skilling and digital ethics – the former to allow us to cross-skill ourselves in a manner we can leverage the automation to higher use and output; the latter to start the journey on responsible and ethical use of digital – so critical to the rapid adoption and accelerated results we want to see from data and AI.

Every time we work with F500 CIO/CDOs we consistently see these themes bubble to the top of the list. Put together, they provide us the foundation we haven’t had before. And when combined a new confidence in driving change borne out of urgency from the pandemic, they become an accelerant for the transformations ahead. So as we close out 2020, we look forward to the next decade – of incredible transformations, amazing innovations, and a solid, ethical framework for our digital future. And, as fast as the pace of change has come to be, it really is the slowest it is ever going to be. Stay safe, be well and Happy Holidays.