Digital transformation (DX) is set to bridge the culture gap, with DX requiring a new level of collaboration between business leaders, employees, and IT staff, according to IT experts.

In 2020, a cultural shift and collaborative mentality will become just as important as the technology itself, said Don Schuerman, CTO, VP product marketing, Pegasystems.

Organisations will look at the DX culture and ramp up efforts to ensure that DX is optimised for success. Expect traditional organisational boundaries between IT and business lines to start breaking down, and new roles like citizen developer and AI Ethicist that blend IT and business backgrounds to grow, he added.

Mankiran Chowhan, Managing Director, Indian Subcontinent, SAP Concur, noted that as we move towards the fourth industrial revolution, workers looking to save time will kick demand for AI into overdrive, and in 2020, workplace changes related to AI will become a noticeable trend.

A recent PwC report revealed that 67 per cent would prefer AI assistance over humans as office assistants. Band-aid transformation is also expected to lose out to deeper DX efforts. Offering consumers a slick interface or a cool app only scratches the surface of a true digital transformation, said Pegasystems Schuerman. He added that next year is bound to witness visible failures of organisations and projects that do not take their transformation efforts below the surface.

AI is also expected to move out of the lab. Rubber will truly meet the road, with DX tech, which has been in a constant state of being in the labs, moving out, explains Schuerman.

While societal tension around AI will continue, Chowhan said that workers openness to automation will incrementally drive change. For example, millennials, who now represent the majority of workers, are instinctively comfortable using AI. As consumers, they are more likely to approve of AI-provided customer support, automated product recommendations, and even want AI to enhance their experience watching sports, he said.

AI and emotional intelligence are expected to converge. Customers are individuals with similar needs: to feel important, heard and respected. As a result, empathetic AI is increasingly applied in advertising, customer service, and to measure how engaged a customer is in their journey.

A report from Accenture showed that AI has the potential to add $957 billion or 15 per cent of Indias current gross value in 2035. Chowhan said that in 2020, this trend will kick into gear, with more technology companies infusing empathy into their AI.

As companies use empathetic AI to bring more of the benefits of advanced technology to life, they will instill more trust, create better user experiences, and deliver higher productivity, said the SAP Concur official.

Machine learning (ML) is also expected to move from a novelty to a routine function. In 2020, ML will be less of a novelty, as it proliferates under the hood of technology services everywhere, especially behind everyday workflows, said Chowhan. Apart from that, data is expected to move from an analytical to a decision-making tool.

In 2020, the shift to leveraging data for real-time decision-making will accelerate for a number of business functions, he added, noting that in the coming years, more organisations will start to realise the potential of their data to intelligently guide business decisions and leverage them to reach even greater levels of success.

Dave Russell, Vice-President of Enterprise Strategy at Veeam Software, noted that all applications will become mission-critical. The number of applications that businesses classify as mission-critical will rise during 2020, paving the way to a landscape in which every app is considered a high-priority, as businesses become completely reliant on their digital infrastructure.

A Veeam Cloud Data Management report showed IT decision-makers saying their business can tolerate two hours downtime of mission-critical apps.

Application downtime costs organisations $20.1 million globally in lost revenue and productivity annually, he said.

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New AI tech to bridge the culture gap in organisations: IT experts - BusinessLine