On 24 September 2015, the American Chamber of Commerce, the Association Professionelle de la Société de l'Information (APSI) and Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) Luxembourg held a conference which gathered around 80 people keen on learning more about the digitalised future.
As Luxembourg gears up for its Third Industrial Revolution and big data, cloud computing, data analytics and mobile internet become part and parcel of many industries, the idea of 'business-as-usual' would seem to no longer apply. As technological transformation grips the Grand Duchy, the question remains of what the future will look like in the face of this technological innovation.
"We don't have a crystal ball for sure, but we can see trends that have been developing in the last few years, and build upon them to anticipate and get ready for changes," explained Gilles Vanderweyen, APSI Vice President and Partner at PwC Luxembourg, at the conference opening.
The line of thinking of Director for Technology Services at CHAMP Cargosystems, Soltysiak Wojciech, suggests that there are five main disruptive technologies to affect the logistic and cargo sector, these being Internet of Things, 3D printing, augmented reality, robotics and thinking machines/artificial intelligence. Whether this 'disruption' represents a risk or an opportunity remains a topic of debate.
"We all live in a logic of 'Create Tomorrow Deliver Today'," commented Wojciech, who believes that agility, consumerisation, social computing, cloud, mobility and predictive analytics have already changed the Information Technology paradigm in companies. "We face an enormous growth of digital content that will disrupt traditional logistics and possibly lead to a complete new industry called Digital Logistics in the near future".
Cyrille Foillard, Managing Director of PwC's Accelerator, singled out mobile internet and cloud computing as the biggest source of future disruption, due to their low cost capacity to build billion-strong user bases rapidly.
"Nobody is exempt from disruption," he commented. "Even the current technology leaders, like Google, are at risk of being displaced. For example, the future of search and SEM may lie more in social media and in e-commerce websites. But more than disruptive technologies, we should talk about disruptive business models. Technologies are enables that define the scope of the potential disruption, but they're not always necessary; innovative business models are really what creates disruption because they make it very difficult for incumbents to respond to a new entrant in an economical way".
Foillard went on to cite the most disruptive business models as the freemium model, promoted by LinkedIn, the free model, employed by search engines, and the marketplace model, drawn upon by Alibaba, Amazon and companies operating under the sharing economy such as Uber, Airbnb and Blablacar.
As new technologies mould the future of politics, culture and civilisation, allowing the population to read and understand new data about themselves, a holistic view of society and business as the interconnection between technology and people appears more applicable.
"We're producing more and more digital content in the sphere of minds, we're plugged to everything and we feed our own database," stated Professor Louis Chauvel of the University of Luxembourg. "The next step will be the feedback - gadgets telling us that we need to eat less or to run more".
However, the technological sphere is not necessarily a secure environment. Whilst Luxembourg ranks among the safest countries in the world in terms of privacy and control on the exchange of information, the EU loses ground in the globalisation game, with emerging countries offering more opportunities for open data. It would however appear to be an issue of lack of tools to implement regulation, rather than lack of regulation itself.
"If you can't audit the code behind an application, you can never know for sure how much information is actually stored or at risk," explained Sven Clement, partner at Clement & Weyer. "It's not enough to educate and inform people of the different risks associated with the use of internet. As long as we can't trust the code that runs our lives, we'll have a problem that not even educated people will solve".
These sentiments echoed the words of economist Jeremy Rifkin as it was announced last Thursday that he would be conducting a study to implement a new economic model in the Grand Duchy which would see the creation of the Third Industrial Revolution, a time of potentially great challenges and equally great opportunities.
CEO of AmCham Luxembourg, Paul Schonenberg, remained optimistic of this futuristic vision, stating "Of course we must have a concerned look, but if you ask me, we should focus on the opportunities rather than on the risks."
Photo by Charles Caratini (L-R: Cyrille Foillard (PwC's Accelerator), Sven Clement (Clement & Weyer), Louis Chauvel (University of Luxembourg), Susan Coleman (PwC) et Wojciech Soltysiak (Champ Cargosystems) and Gilles Vanderweyen)
