Digital transformation will empower people by bringing together emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), according to the latest edition of the Fujitsu Technology and Service Vision (FT&SV).
Under the theme of ‘Human Centric Innovation: Digital Co-creation’, this year’s evolution of the Fujitsu vision proposes a unique approach to co-creation through using digital technologies. Fujitsu believes the process of digital co-creation will become a business norm in an emerging digital society. Digital co-creation blends customer business experience with digital technologies to create new value together, helping shape a better future.
As outlined in the latest FT&SV, Fujitsu expects new technology will empower people, businesses and the public sector to collaborate and co-create to transform business and drive social innovation. Fujitsu also outlines practical steps technology leaders can take to maximize the value of digital technologies.
The defining characteristic of the future digital workforce will be its ability to leverage AI-based technology, with Fujitsu seeing the analytical power of AI and the creativity of people as being complementary. In the workplace of the future, these will come together, with intelligent AI systems creating insights from big data and autonomous robots taking over the repetitive, mundane tasks.
Digital technology will augment the capability of people, enabling innovation and greater productivity. Fujitsu observes that people need to rediscover human capabilities like creativity and empathy, as well as acquiring literacy in digital technologies.
The human centric approach of a new digital business workforce, working more productively and empowered to drive further innovation, will be more important than ever in this new digital era. In the future, Fujitsu predicts that intelligent systems will be able to employ AI to learn from data, generating new insights and supporting people in making optimal decisions.
This is already starting to happen: Fujitsu and the Innovation Unit of the San Carlos Clinical Hospital in Madrid, Spain, jointly developed an AI solution called HIKARI (which means “light” in Japanese). This brings together an advanced suite of micro-services enabling doctors to extract knowledge and carry out analyses using multiple data sources related to patient health, assisting doctors in making more informed decisions, while freeing them from the burden of reviewing piles of paperwork to extract information.
In a world where every business is becoming a technology company, Fujitsu believes that successful firms of the future will design their business models around the three transformational forces of digital technology:
Connectivity – connecting all internal systems and connecting to external partners
Intelligence – generating intelligent insights from huge volumes of data through AI learning
People – shifting the business view from the supply-side to the customer side to deliver truly personalized customer experiences
Pulling this all together is Digital co-creation, combining business expertise with digital technology and working with customers and partners to provide innovative products and services that meet the individual needs of customers.
Yoshikuni Takashige, vice-president of marketing strategy and vision at Fujitsu, says: “Advancing technology and Digital Co-creation is leading to the creation of more intelligent businesses. Co-creation allows organizations to create ‘Digital Arenas’ that cut through traditional boundaries to provide integrated customer services. For example, we can look forward to more personalized healthcare and wellbeing services, mobility solutions instead of transport, and customer lifestyle experiences instead of retail.
“We believe a key characteristic of a future digital workforce will be its ability to work closely with AI-based intelligent systems, receiving help and advice and together processing a wide range of tasks. It is key to put people at the center of everything we do. The analytical power of AI and the creativity of people are complementary. Fujitsu is developing AI technology solely for the purpose of empowering people and promoting positive and far reaching benefits across society.
“Now is the time for industry leaders to decide how they want to evolve their business model, develop a vision for a digitally-transformed world and implement their digital business architecture in five layers – customers, ecosystem, workforce, processes and technology itself. Co-creation is all about realizing that vision rather than making small, incremental changes and improvements. It requires a new style of technology that connects everything, learns from data, generates intelligence and empowers people to make better decisions,” adds Takashige.