Digital Transformation: An imperative in 2021 for the High-Tech industry

In the post-pandemic world, businesses are shifting digital priorities to tackle the onslaught of challenges and aiming for relevance by combining emerging technologies with existing ones. Having said that, every industry is shifting at its own pace. The sense of urgency weighs heavier on the high-tech industry, which is considered a forerunner of digital innovation and cannot be seen lagging.

Multiple tech transformations are happening, and it is hard to pin-point the essentials imperative to business growth. With the current trends and a broader understanding, here are the top digital focus areas for the High-tech industry today from our lens:

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The technology industry leads the pack when it comes to AI integrations into their services and communication. A study by KPMG shows that around 79% of the industry leaders are up for more aggressive AI adoption and implementation. At the same time, 63% say that their organization's AI operationality ranges from moderate to complete.

AI is at the center of High-tech industry's future roadmap. Not just limited to chatbots and email personalization, the use cases pertaining to this technology go beyond. As we move into the future of digital acceleration, we would see more high-tech companies strengthening their AI performance, machine learning, and deep reinforcement learning techniques to make them easy to adopt in the regular world.

With the help of natural language processing and other agile technologies, AI helps manufacturers to predict future customer needs, and understand, plan and deploy new products and their lifecycles. This reduces iterations and ensures timely release. It offers programmable solutions to understand the behaviors of clients, enterprises, and the ecosystem in its entirety, which, in-turn, creates customized solutions for all.

Connected Experiences

Changing customer expectations, continuous innovation, and extreme competition are driving factors to create remarkable customer experiences that help high-tech companies stand out in the crowd. Creating an experience-led business is the need of the hour. Design to service delivery, everyone is looking for a certain degree of customization with today's compartmentalized needs. The 'one size fits all' approach is not the right fit for everyone. For instance, today, people are connected over different devices from different locations. High-tech companies have to ensure agile solutions and design responsiveness for everyone, whether using laptops, MacBooks, or smartphones. Again, people from different areas would have different needs because of the location-specific compliances, weather conditions, and economy. High-tech companies need to offer a seamless customized experience viable for every situation.

Blockchain

Blockchain has progressed from an emerging technology that powered cryptocurrency to being on the radar for every major organization. With inherent features like advanced security, decentralized platform, and immutability, blockchain allows business to improve efficiency and minimize risk while building trust across all business transactions.

From managing contracts, validating product authenticity, secure transitions, consolidating data to safeguarding intellectual properties, disseminating solutions, cross-border trading, supply chain distribution, real-time data access, and communication - the use cases of blockchain are widespread.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive Analytics is an indispensable tool for driving efficiency in a complex business environment. Characterized by digital disruption, globally deployed value chains, and continuous service innovation, the high-tech industry uses predictive analytics to modify its offerings according to customer needs. Using real-time web experiences, businesses predict customer demands to deliver personalized services.

With the help of these predictions and insights, high-tech manufacturers can schedule maintenance, prevent breakdowns, reduce downtimes, improve distribution channels by bypassing the middle entities, create new revenue streams, improve customer support, and more. This proves effective in building and streamlining an efficient supply chain and vendor management system, with all the quality checks in place.

Data and Analytics

The emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things, has revolutionized businesses. Connected systems are generating troves of data, and the entire system is now shifting towards data-driven decision-making. Processing data in real-time allows enterprises to gain granular insights into their operations and allows them to make smart business decisions.

These decisions play a vital role in fine-tuning the entire customer journey. Starting with demand planning and distribution forecasts to optimizing inventory, benchmarking quality, evaluating stocks and replenishment, and capacity planning; data crunching is crucial at every stage of the product lifecycle.

Internet of Things (IoT)

High tech companies are both the producers and consumers of IoT offerings. With the help of IoT, industry leaders aim to drive sales by curating personalized products and services. They help to decrease input costs through optimized operations and expand industry boundaries. By leveraging machine-to-machine communications, companies can change the basis of competition and drive new business models for users and suppliers,

Internet of Things allows solutions to be tailored to meet industry needs such as supply chain management, creating smart factories and buildings, and automating employee services.

Cloud

According to a Harvard Business Review survey, 82% of High-tech executives believe that a successful cloud computing strategy would become a differentiator and give you a competitive edge in the high-tech market segment.

Making integrations convenient and based on a pay-as-you-go model, these cloud-based solutions are a cost-effective way to step up efficiency. It is fast and accessible and allows businesses to seamlessly process tons of data. Public, private, or edge computing, high-tech companies should leverage it to improve operational efficiency and make effective decisions.

Pandemic mandated workforces globally to adopt newer methods of working. Companies are investing more in cloud-based - SaaS, IaaS, and CPaaS to enhance productivity and working efficiency. Also, the industry sees a major shift towards cloud-based CCaaS, UCaaS, CXaaS to meet the evolving customer expectations.

Integrated Platforms

It is predicted that by 2025, High-tech companies will rely on integrated platforms and subscription-based cloud services for intellectual property monetization. This implies efficient, reliable products and improved customer experience.

Integrated platforms allow businesses to be agile enough to scale their operations while maintaining interoperability with legacy systems. It also allows them to streamline customer interactions, thus improving customer experience. High-tech organizations can manage product design, service delivery, distribution, and workflow automation end-to-end in a single platform.

To summarize, all these technologies are interdependent, and coherence is essential for better functioning. IoT, for example, needs to work with smart watches and fitness trackers and transfer data via the cloud to help the marketing team strategize personalized campaigns. Blockchain and AI are combining together to revolutionize businesses. It is like a gigantic puzzle piece, and today's High-tech companies are putting them all together. To match the accelerated pace of digital transformation, High-tech companies are devising and implementing innovative, reliable, and customizable solutions. Exciting, indeed!

The author is Nitesh Mirchandani, Vice President and Global Head, Communications, Media & Technology (CMT) Vertical, Birlasoft.