Digital Transformations and AI - Video 2

Summary

The video explores the relentless advancements in technology and digital transformation in various sectors, highlighting its impact on global markets, industry giants, agriculture, media, and transportation. It discusses how technology, now readily accessible, has democratized industries, allowing for innovation at reduced costs. Examples like precision agriculture, citizen journalism, and the transformation of the taxi industry into a ride-sharing model through companies like Uber and Grab are illustrated. The conversation also touches on the democratization of energy production, likening it to past computing transformations.

Highlights

• Tech spending in developed markets has seen a massive increase, reshaping industries and enabling new giants like Microsoft and Amazon to emerge. 🌟
• Digital advancements allow farmers and fishermen to make informed decisions through real-time data. 📊
• Citizen journalism empowered by digital media offers new ways to approach journalism and storytelling. 📰
• The taxi industry has transformed significantly with ride-sharing apps like Uber and Grab, illustrating the shift to an asset-light economy. 🚖
• AI and smartphones are catalyzing shifts in various traditional sectors, offering unprecedented data access and operational efficiency. 🤖

Key Takeaways

• Tech investment soared from under 10% to nearly 25% of capital expenditures, reshaping global markets. 📈
• Digital transformation democratizes industries, creating opportunities in unforeseen areas, like agriculture and media. 🌍
• Evolving tech trends fuel the rise of companies like Google and Amazon, showing limitless possibilities. 🚀
• AI and smartphones have made it easier for traditional industries like fishing to optimize operations and increase profitability. 📱
• The future is about imagination and ecosystem building, integrating digital tools with human creativity. 🌐

Overview

In today's rapidly evolving world, digital transformation is at the forefront of change across multiple industries. The global investment in technology, rising dramatically from under 10% to nearly 25% of capital expenditures, has propelled companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft into industry stalwarts. This shift underscores the rapid adaptation to a digitized global landscape, offering boundless opportunities for growth and innovation.

As the video elucidates, this digital wave isn't just benefiting tech giants; it's a catalyst for broader industry rejuvenation. Farmers and fishermen, for instance, now have access to precision data through AI and smartphones, enabling them to make informed decisions that boost productivity and profitability. Similarly, media has witnessed a significant shift, where the barriers to entry have lowered drastically, fostering a culture of citizen journalism that expands the narrative possibilities.

Perhaps one of the most profound changes is evident in the transformation of traditional service sectors like transportation. The rise of ride-sharing platforms such as Uber and Grab signifies a pivot to a more flexible, asset-light economic model. This democratization of services, coupled with the increasing ease of digital integration, paints a vibrant picture for the future where technology and human ingenuity drive progress.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Capital Expenditures in Technology The chapter discusses the significant shift in global investment towards technology, particularly in developed markets. Decades ago, less than 10% of capital expenditures were directed towards digital and IT-related investments. Today, that figure is approaching 25%, indicating a substantial change in how companies allocate their financial resources.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Rise of Tech Giants and Digitization Trends The chapter discusses the emergence of major technology companies during a period of significant transformation in the business world, driven by increasing availability and decreasing costs of computing power. Major companies mentioned include IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Netscape, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. This era marked a turning point where the business world collectively recognized new opportunities enabled by advancements in technology.
• 01:30 - 03:30: Data Explosion Impact on Various Sectors The chapter discusses the growing trend of digitalization affecting various sectors globally. As the world increasingly becomes digitized, interactions and transactions are also becoming digitized. The focus for individuals and businesses should be on identifying opportunities that arise from this digital explosion. The text references participants from Harvard and the Aspire Institute, including those engaged in traditional markets like the C aach Fish Market, highlighting impacts across diverse socio-economic segments.
• 03:30 - 04:30: Mindset Barriers and Innovation Costs The chapter discusses the impact of data accessibility on different communities, such as microfinance communities in Mexico City and fishermen. The explosion of data, particularly through smartphones, allows these groups to access crucial meteorological information. For example, fishermen can use their smartphones to obtain data about incoming storms or water temperatures, ultimately aiding in their decision-making and improving their work efficiency.
• 04:30 - 07:30: Media Industry Transformation The chapter 'Media Industry Transformation' begins with an analogy from the fishing industry, highlighting how traditional instincts and wisdom in fishing have evolved with technological advances. Nowadays, rather than relying solely on instinct, fishermen can use smartphone technology to predict where fish will be and make decisions based on quantifiable data. The chapter discusses the advantages this modern technology brings, making life easier by providing readily accessible information, exemplified by fishermen who can choose their landing port based on real-time offers from different brokers.
• 07:30 - 08:30: Citizen Journalism and News Democratization The chapter discusses how immediate access to information is democratizing industries such as fishing and agriculture. Fishermen can now determine the best ports to sell their catch at optimal prices by being aware of supply and demand conditions. This newfound access reduces opportunities for brokers to exploit them. Similarly, in agriculture, farmers can leverage technology to make informed decisions about where and when to sell their produce, thus optimizing profits and reducing waste.
• 08:30 - 12:30: Transformation of the Taxi Industry The chapter 'Transformation of the Taxi Industry' explores the significant changes brought about by technology in various sectors, with a particular focus on agriculture. It highlights how advancements like satellite imagery and low-cost sensors, accessible via smartphones, are revolutionizing traditional farming methods. The digitization of farming practices is emphasized, leading to increased precision and efficiency. The discussion unfolds the broader implications of technology on traditional industries, including the taxi sector, showcasing how innovation is gradually reshaping these fields.
• 12:30 - 15:30: Transportation and Income Opportunities in Southeast Asia The chapter titled 'Transportation and Income Opportunities in Southeast Asia' discusses the challenges and barriers in the adoption of new technologies in developing regions. It highlights the point that these barriers are not just technological but also psychological, suggesting that changing mindsets is as crucial as technological advancement itself. The narrative emphasizes the importance of making technology accessible and understandable to people in order to bridge the gap between the availability of advanced technologies and their implementation in everyday life.
• 15:30 - 18:30: AI and Energy Industry Digitization The chapter discusses the exponential drop in barriers to innovation with technology in the energy industry. It highlights that the tools and technologies are now widely available, making it more about leveraging imagination to drive innovation. The conversation also emphasizes the importance of building ecosystems to facilitate this imaginative process, supported by the available scientific tools and computing power.

Digital Transformations and AI - Video 2 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 so let's just take a step back and just think about the fact that uh worldwide especially in in in uh in in um in in developed markets there has been a Relentless investment in technology in it and you know over the many decades we've gone from less than 10% of capital expenditures so like what happens how companies allocate money uh going towards uh digital to now approaching close to 25% that's huge change it's a
• 00:30 - 01:00 huge change and in that era what we've seen is all these Giants come about right like IBM and Microsoft and sap and Netscape and Amazon and Google and Salesforce all these companies came about because the whole world said to uh to each other the business World said to each other that as more and more computers become available as the cost of computation goes down right we can do more things with this and more opportunities show up and I think that's a really important thing because this
• 01:00 - 01:30 trend is going to keep continuing right more and more of the world is going to get digitized more of the ways in which we interact is going to get digitized and then the key for us is to say what can I do with it what are the opportunities that come up uh from this to to make it happen so think think about um some of our participants right whether it's participants in our Harvard classroom whether it's the Aspire Institute participants who are living their lives you know um buying and selling fish in the C aach Fish Market
• 01:30 - 02:00 that you were talking about earlier um or as part of a micro Finance community in in Mexico City yes um give me some sense of how this explosion of data is going to matter to any of those settings or pick any setting no 100% so look like let's talk about the fisherman there's been some great examples right so a few things now with the smartphone now you probably can get meteorological data yeah right so you know like When Storms will be coming or where the temp whatever the water is going to be and
• 02:00 - 02:30 where the fish are going to be right that's a that's P before it was like instinct you would sort of smell the air WID all wisdom like you know you know Red Sky sailor Delight you know all that kind of stuff like you know so those are all wisdoms now you can quantify it and you can have it available to you on your smartphone so it makes your life easier there's these great examples of when fishermen go out there and they're fishing they need to land at a port to sell their fish right and different ports and different Brokers will offer
• 02:30 - 03:00 different prices right and so now they can get immediate access to saying where should I go which Port would offer me the best price for my fish where is their relative scarcity of fish they go there exactly exactly right and so before you would always go the same port and maybe your broker cheated you because the supply was a lot and then you were like okay the prices are going to drop right but now you know exactly where the demand is going to be and you can go that or even agriculture right same with agriculture right as we were
• 03:00 - 03:30 talking earlier a big portion of the world relies on agriculture as a source of employment of employment and so forth but now you can with salad imagery that's now low cost you can do Precision agriculture all again available through your smartphone right and with lowcost sensors you can do so much more so so now the you know like now we're like digitizing the the the the farmers field right and putting it into into action absolutely along the way so what's interesting to me about this Kore is is that I think uh and tell me if you agree
• 03:30 - 04:00 with this perspective my perspective from wandering around the developing world is that the barrier to applying these is as much in people's mindsets as it is in the technology technology has moved way ahead yeah for humankind to catch up with it requires i' like to say self-servingly people who are packaging it in a way that they can that they can understand it 100% I mean look I mean I think I think the the big thing my sense is that the cost to
• 04:00 - 04:30 innovate with these Technologies has dropped exponentially right and the tools available to use the Technologies has become widely available so now I think it's a matter of imagination it really is I it really is it really is and and if I can connect to what we spoke about earlier it's about building the ecosystem to allow this imagination to click in exactly the tool is there the science is there the the ability to compute compute power is very
• 04:30 - 05:00 compared if can sit there and say do an exercise of what ifs yes um which I highly encourage every to do all the time it's like what if we what if we did something crazy and then think okay to make that happen I need to do ABC like the examples we were talking I think this is very cool yeah yeah and just to sort of keep keep giving a few more examples of this right this is impacting a whole bunch IND industry so in the media industry we see the same thing right so what what what the folks are seeing right now is what happened what
• 05:00 - 05:30 used to happen in the past so there was this great um uh there's a movie now too about the the Miracle On Hudson River remember the US Airway plane that lost lost his power and then U I forget the name of the captain he sort of landed yeah very famous Sul Sul Captain Captain Sul land there's a movie about it Tom Hanks played Sully you know hero all that kind of stuff this was like broadcast live on CNN right because CNN studio was right there right and it was made all news right traditional side
• 05:30 - 06:00 then a few years later uh there's a amazing example of of this treat so in San Francisco uh um you know uh a plane coming from Korea crash landed I see on the on the runway in San Francisco and David un who had who's a Samsung executive who I got the chance to meet writes the following tweet right I just crash landed in San Francisco
• 06:00 - 06:30 tail ripped off most everyone seems fine I'm okay surreal and he posts a picture so David is my classmate is he really you're kidding me you know that I didn't know about this tweet it's so funny David was at Harvard Law School no way the same year that you were HBS yes and we met because I did a lot of work on Samsung next when he whipped it okay well small world here we are digital world so so so again before you needed CNN big cameras now it's presses the
• 06:30 - 07:00 person in in who's experiencing the news is part of the news is the news story themselves is breaking the news right and that's what Twitter did that's what you know Facebook's done right that's what Tik tok's done and so forth right like it has basically shown that the media industry which was concentrated amongst all these TV studios and all these newspapers is now fully democratized for both good and for bad right in terms of what that does right so this is part of the digital transformation again smartphone and then
• 07:00 - 07:30 somebody saying I'm going to build a platform to to trade images and to trade little bits of information becomes a media platform as well so this morning uh when I was driving in to do this uh to this video shoot um on National Public Radio there was a story there's been a lot of angst in America but local newspapers dying out the economics are not working and private Equity firms coming in and gutting them and so on and it's a mess because you have these News desert desert deserts news deserts which is bad for democracy and so on so the
• 07:30 - 08:00 NPR guys suggested and I thought it's just brilliant is look just take the kids in the high school and train them to be citizen journalists yes and they'll wander around they'll get they'll get expertise in learning how to write they get expertise interviews to interview to prevent to present balanced perspectives and bring them into it don't think of it as a you know Calamity that we ring our hands think of it as an opportunity that we can do something with exactly that's the democratization of news and it's it's feasible because
• 08:00 - 08:30 of digital media exactly exactly great and then of course all of us experience this now globally about what happened to the taxi industry right so grab and yeah Ola d u u you know Kareem in the Middle East you know all these things happen and do you remember 15 years ago how hard it was to get a taxi in Cambridge Massachusetts yeah how like I think I would call I to like book week ahead uh and they would
• 08:30 - 09:00 give me like a 2-hour window well maybe the taxi driver will show up right and then they would be mad at you anyway that you disturb them from drinking their donuts and drinking their coffee and donuts right and maybe they would show up do you remember that do in in in newon we had this kinly guy who would shout at you if you call him yeah you to call somebody right uh and so we were in this world where taxi drivers had to buy the cabs right uh and you medallions medallions were super expensive and so
• 09:00 - 09:30 for and then we went to this world that Uber started which was like ride sharing right like you can basically have it starts first with limousines but then any driver with with u um with lift actually starting that that that that Revolution any driver could take anybody somewhere else and just think about how much the world has changed right like you're now getting into a car of a stranger and they're going to take you from point A to point B and you're not going to give them any money it's in the back end it's all
• 09:30 - 10:00 digit digitally enabled through your credit card or through your payment system and and so we went from this world of asset heavy to asset light right and and we democratized who could be a a taxi driver we democratized Transportation now it wasn't just a monopoly of cab drivers and limousine drivers anybody could could potentially participate you know when I was talking to Anthony tan uh the C the co-founder and CEO of of of grab in Southeast Asia he goes that you know they're they are
• 10:00 - 10:30 enabling 10 million Southeast Asians to have income right because they now can use their mopeds their bikes or their cars to do delivery to do transportation and so on and so forth and so again that's this the digital transformation of the Auto industry and look more generally we've been sort of living through these waves over time of all these companies coming in and transforming uh from going from an era of mainframes and computers to PC and
• 10:30 - 11:00 the web to mobile to networks and Ai and now we're in this world of AI so an interesting U parallel that's going through my mind because we started with uh thermostats and utility companies and nest and so on um and in some sense what we're also living through because of digitization in the energy industry is sort of what the Computing industry went through from mainframes to PS to handheld
• 11:00 - 11:30 supercomputers is that the generation and dissemination of electric power yes is being democratized right so you have solar panels you have small wind generating Machin and a whole geothermal geal plora so everybody is going to be an energy producer and a consumer connected to the grid digitally right and then you have this amazing Market making going on it's very exciting yeah yeah