Mastering the Digital Economy: Winning with AI, Bots, and Algorithms — New Cognizant Insights on The Work Ahead

A new economy — a digital economy — is emerging from the red hot furnace of technological innovation. An economy based on platforms and algorithms and bots and connected “things” is taking shape and, it’s already generating massive amounts of new money from ideas that represent the future.

In order to understand how to be in the winner’s circle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, in conjunction with the economics research group Roubini Thought Works, surveyed  nearly 2,500 current (and future) members of the global business community. The new white paper, The Work Ahead, and interactive data explorer provide fresh insight and unique guidance on how business -- and jobs -- must evolve in an era of algorithms, automation and AI.

Four key themes emerged from the research and analysis:

- We may think we understand “digital” and how big it’s going to be, but frankly we don’t ….  Over three years the impact will grow to nearly $20 trillion across the industries we studied. Digital is not just a technology shift, it’s a revolution in how businesses will create value.

- The digital “dark side” is real, but pessimism and denial are not good business strategies. The spoils will go to those who take the (managed) risk.

- Business leaders are sitting on untapped cost savings that can be mined with our new machines. Those who don’t capture this value are already paying a crippling Laggard Penalty.

- Artificial intelligence has left the laboratory (and/or movie lot) and is in your building now (or should be).

Authors Ben Pring and Paul Roehrig — also co-authors of the award-winning Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business — write, “With new machines and new business models based on information, the rules of the game are being rewritten.” Sharing a roadmap for The Work Ahead, the authors note, “At the heart of this digital economy are changes in work. The work that got us to the present won’t get us to the future because the digital economy requires completely different skill sets and attitudes, as well as greater expectations.”

See more details and hear more from the authors here.

In The Work Ahead, Cognizant provides fact-based insight, economic analysis, and specific tactics to guide the future of your work.

To view the white paper and explore this topic in depth, click here.