“Constant deliberate innovation focus is a critical need for businesses today”

Shrugging off the disruptions of last year, businesses and agencies are looking for a strong revival in 2021. Adgully – as part of our annual TRENDING NOW endeavour – has been presenting the strategies and views of a cross-section of industry leaders as they go about reclaiming lost time and market opportunities and build for a stronger future, armed with the lessons of 2020. 

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In conversation with Adgully, Vineet Kumar, Co-Founder & Chief Solution Architect, Affine, speaks about how organisations should focus on developing solutions that are super-agile and can adapt quickly to any shocks in the future.

Outlook for 2021 

Artificial Intelligence, Analytical Engineering, and Cloud have been evolving within themselves over the last decade. Presently they have come together in limited organizations and industries to enable the business transformation that has shaken the respective industries.

Adopting right technologies was key in helping industries recover from the pandemic, and the year 2021 is mere continuum of this trend. After a decade of hyper-specialisation, AI, AE, and Cloud will start converging in varying degrees to introduce countless new solutions. These new solutions will revolutionise industries such as retail, automotive, manufacturing, gaming, and healthcare.

The convergence of AI, AE & Cloud technologies is imperative –

• AI drives the strategy to achieve the business goal
• AE facilitates easy storage and access of data for the AI engine
• For operations and solution implementation, Cloud provides required scalability and flexibility

Great Expectations 

After recovering from the shock of pandemic, while scaling up, organisations should focus on developing solutions that are super-agile and can adapt quickly to any shocks in the future.

There is an expectation in the year 2021 that businesses will invest more resources and effort in developing AI-ready data foundations. This effort exclusively to ensure that the AI engines can be re-calibrated and deployed quickly to respond quickly to system shocks.

Pandemic has given strong signs on how flexibility and scalability facilitation of cloud technology can be a game-changer to act quickly to the aftermath instances. Along with providing ready to use business solutions (marketplace) shortening the go-to-market time, cloud adoption would be a priority across industries, and cloud will become a baseline skillset, like python.

Many businesses have learned that their systems are due for an overhaul and need to quickly upskill and upgrade their systems to overcome a tough situation like pandemic. To keep the systems updated and agile, organisations are expected to invest, and boost innovation focus led by Centers of Excellence (CoEs) within the organisations. CoEs’ will play the powerhouse of the organisation to research, innovate, and institutionalise new developments and best practices in the organisation.

Key learnings from 2020

All industries suffered severely in 2020, because businesses spent a lot of time assessing and predicting what is going to happen. The huge risk of system shocks was the biggest learning in 2020; as a result, the need for organisations to be agile is paramount.

AI solutions were expected to be re-calibrated and deployed quickly to counter external shocks and disruptions. Engineering and Cloud practices could have used AI appropriately to boost the agility of solution approaches.

Many businesses failed to comprehend how Analytical Engineering can expedite AI re-modeling by having business unit level data ponds and creating Enterprise level feature stores. These methodologies can help build an AI-ready data foundation that accelerates all AI development throughout the organisation.

Given a Cloud provider’s exposure to a multitude of customers and their business problems, Cloud providers are at the forefront of innovation and building highly relevant business solutions for multiple industries. These packaged solutions can be leveraged to reduce time and effort for AI development.

Constant deliberate innovation focus is a critical need for businesses in today’s world where technology is evolving, and industries are growing at a pace never seen before. Having a CoE is no longer an option for growth, but a basic need for sustenance. Only CoEs can play an effective role in assessing business problems in a complex environment and design robust AI-based solutions.

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