Author: Sandra Maycotte, researcher at Thematic Area Group in Corporate Strategy.
The adoption of digital technologies has become the way forward for most companies to ensure the sustainability of their competitiveness, according to a study published by the IBM Business Value Institute. However, it is also common to find entrepreneurs who say they are not obtaining the expected benefits from their investments in digital technologies.
In the wake of the disruption caused by Industry 4.0 and its acceleration by the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are facing critical challenges not seen before. In today's business world, companies are immersed in a VUCA environment (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), a concept that in light of recent changes, futurist Jamais Cascio proposes evolving as a VUCA nvironment. fragile, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible, also by its acronym in Spanish).
In addition to this, companies face the pressure of having to enrich their customers' experience more and more every day, since they expect an increasingly personalized product or service, in less time, arising from transparent processes and, even, with availability of the traceability of your delivery in real time. Improving customer experience through value creation is possible thanks to the adoption of digital technologies that enable the digital transformation of companies. This leads me to question the extent to which the pervasiveness of digital technologies in day-to-day business operations will continue to grow, and where the frontier lies at which diminishing returns to the adoption of digital technologies will be generated. It seems that every day we lose more human contact and migrate to the virtual dimension, in addition to the fact that many activities are now automated, carried out by robots or chatbots, and no longer by human beings.
The superiority of computers in carrying out certain tasks that surpass the abilities of human beings cannot be questioned. There are numerous examples that support this argument, such as the multivariate analysis of large databases that today is carried out in a matter of seconds, when computers a few years ago did it in days; or the response time to the request of Walmart's vice president of Food Safety, Frank Yiannas, who asked his employees, at some point before 2016,* to tell him the origin of the packaged mango he was holding in his hands: his equipment It took 7 days to respond, and obtaining said data in 2022 would take 2.2 seconds thanks to the use of the blockchain.
In other tasks, however, the superiority of humans over computers remains undeniable, such as in tasks that require common sense, creativity and empathy. Researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have called the inverse relationship between technological and human capabilities the Moravec paradox.
Reflecting on this paradox leads me to consider the importance of the interaction between technology and humans: everything would indicate that the success of a company does not depend only on its digital transformation, but on the human team that developed and implemented it using their creativity. , innovation and common sense. Investment in cutting-edge digital technologies may then not be enough for business success: the integration of humans and technology is required to successfully achieve the expected results, and not the displacement of humans by machines. The key lies in learning to take advantage of the capabilities of digital technologies to leverage the skills of the human team. Therefore, the company must continue investing not only in updating digital technologies, but also in its human talent.
This is a wake-up call for business leaders. They must not only commit to the adoption and implementation of digital technologies such as AI, for example, in the digitalization of their operations, but also ensure that their decisions adhere to the real purpose of the company, its reason for existing, and its convictions. ethics, and therefore, to maintain the relevance of the role of its human team in the evolutionary process of the organization. The key lies in identifying the limitations of technology and the opportunities that arise in the face of digital disruption; in finding how humans and technology can best interact and complement each other to create an organization that adds value greater than the sum of its parts.
* Starting from the “mango incident,” Walmart began working on its traceability project in October 2016, precisely regarding mangoes and pork.
Originally published in Infobae.