The technologists, business leaders, politicians, and government officials went off to Davos for the World Economic Forum to sit and talk about the new economy; how the world is about to shift into a new type of economy unlike the billionaires who are trying to save themselves from a bleak future as being envisioned by the technology pessimists. The way for you to future-proof yourselves will be to become life-long learners, pursue your own passions, and be positive against all odds.
According to the Deloitte report, this year is suppose to be the year that technological advances happen. Deloitte had predicted that in order for enterprises to survive, they need to re-engineer their companies from both ways: the top down and bottom up. Every company needs to modernise their IT infrastructure, using automation and the outcome budgetary will be the way to go.
Since the recession, which caused many people and millennials to go unemployed and underemployed, there were many startups that sprang up and changed the status quo of the old economy of capitalism where enterprises were still being built on the traditional business hierarchy. The capitalists would cut costs and maximise profits at the expenses of their workers till one innovator changed the way we work for 100 years, Henry Ford, who invented the American automobile industry and the 9 to 5 pm for the weekdays with increased wages.
However, the startup entrepreneurs have been leveraging technological innovation since the 1990s Age of Information like free software and hiring remotely through marketplaces like Upwork and Elance that allowed their business models to disrupt the traditional business models. This was built on labour-intensive. Meanwhile, these startups were capital intensive, which allowed them to expand fast with the money from well – known venture capital. A good example will be this startup that doesn’t require traditional brick and mortar offices who practised a hierarchical organisation which they were responsible for this popular term at their height of the glory ‘holacracy,’ pioneered by the founder of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. With this new concept, it allowed many co-working spaces to develop and disrupt the traditional office spaces like mushrooms; and this kind of trend inspired daredevils, who are risk takers, to run their startup companies. Another company that popularised open – source platform for blogging that brought the world WordPress, Automattic was a company which started the remote companies that inspired entrepreneurs to run their business.
As technologies are getting more advanced due to their efficiency and becoming more user – friendly, repetitive jobs can be easily automated. According to the Oxford University report, 47% of jobs will be automated, a worrying trend as the current SME entrepreneurs who haven’t been adaptable would need to deploy their current workers and another workforce to re-skill their obsolete skills and adopt automation as technology. AI and machine learning, like algorithms, would easily detect and match things compared to humans’ manual work. Therefore, it showed that these technologies are getting highly cognitive where Deloitte called it cognitive technology. AI and machine learning will be the trend in healthcare and marketing. However, PWC reported the AI would create many jobs for future to come if the current workforces and future generations could future – proof themselves.
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