The Financial Express, India: Senior Director at Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work Says Speed is the New Currency of Business

“Speed is the new currency of business to win in the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by digital technologies,” writes Manish Bahl. “Market changes that used to take decades to happen, now transpire within weeks and months.” Excerpts:

“Traditional companies, who have a strong grounding in their markets are in an excellent position to capitalize on the Fourth Industrial Revolution or the machine age.

Though businesses need ambitious goals, overblown promises and expectations will only lead to disappointments. The AHEAD model points to the five areas in which businesses must act to effectively compete in this machine age.

A: Speed to automate: Robotic process automation (RPA) applied in long-standing core business processes can make businesses cut costs by 30-60% while making operations error-free.

H: Speed to monetize halos of information: Companies using advanced analytics and machine learning are twice as likely to be top-quartile financial performers, and thrice more likely to execute effective decisions.

E: Speed to enhance the workforce: Businesses should target to enhance every employee to speed up the company’s performance by making the AI-driven machine, every worker’s new ‘colleague’.

A: Speed to abundance: Businesses can create markets of abundance by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), analytics and automation to drive down costs and widen market volume.

D: Speed to discovery: Companies aiming to trigger innovation should break rules, and dare to experiment.

While the AHEAD model shows the path forward for digital success, a speed framework is needed to set the right pace of growth. For accelerating growth, improve collaboration, embrace asset-light business model, move from speed data to speed intelligence, make cybersecurity a competitive differentiator, and make IT the speed heroes.”

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