The clashes and backlashes of consumers vs technology vs business may boil over unless we defuse trust, inclusion and transparency issues.

To compete and succeed in a world where digital is everywhere, companies need a new focus on balancing “value” with “values,” aligning their drive to create business value with their customers’ and employees’ values and expectations, according to the 20th edition of Accenture’s yearly report, “We, The Post-Digital People: Can your enterprise survive the ‘tech-clash’?”

Even though people are embedding technology into their lives more than ever before, the report found that organizations’ attempts to meet such needs and expectations can fall short. As companies enter the decade of delivering on their digital promises—and in a world where digital technology is everywhere—a new mindset and approach is required.

While some have referred to today’s environment as a “tech-lash,” or backlash against technology, that term fails to acknowledge the extent to which society is using and benefitting from technology. Rather, the report assert that it is a tech-clash—a clash between business and technology models that are incongruous with people’s needs and expectations.

Of the more than 6,000 business and IT executives worldwide that Accenture surveyed for the Technology Vision report, 83% acknowledged that technology has become an inextricable part of the human experience. As part of the research, Accenture also surveyed 2,000 consumers—70% of whom expected their relationship with technology to be more or significantly more prominent over the next three years.

Said Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s Chief Technology & Innovation Officer: “Dazzled by the promise of technology, many organizations created digital products and services just because they could, without fully considering the human, organizational and societal consequences. Today we’re seeing a tech-clash caused by the tension between consumer expectations, the potential of technology and business ambitions—and are now at an important leadership inflection point. We must shift our mindset from ‘just because’ to ‘trust because’—reexamining our fundamental business and technology models and creating a new basis for competition and growth.”

Five trends to defuse tech-clash

According to the report, continuing with existing models does not just risk irritating customers or disengaging employees, but could permanently limit the potential for future innovation and growth. But tech-clash is a challenge that can be solved.

Peter Yuan, Technology Lead, Southeast Asia at Accenture, added: “Technology advancements are growing rapidly across ASEAN, but to lead in the future, organizations must revisit their fundamental business and technology models and better align them with people’s expectations. For instance, organizations will need to move beyond deploying AI for automation alone, and push into the new frontier of co-creation between people and machines. Companies in Thailand and Indonesia are well on their way, with 50% of local business and technology executives reporting that they have inclusive design or human-centric design principles in place to support human-machine collaboration, compared to just 37% of executives globally.”

The Technology Vision report identified five key trends that companies must address over next three years to defuse tech-clash and realize new forms of business value that will be driven in part by stronger, more trusting relationships with stakeholders:

  • The I in Experience. Organizations will need to design personalized experiences that amplify an individual’s agency and choice. This turns passive audiences into active participants by transforming one-way experiences—which can leave people feeling out of control and out of the loop—into true collaborations. Globally, 85% of business and IT executives surveyed believed that competing successfully in this new decade requires organizations to elevate their relationships with customers as partners.
  • AI and Me. AI should bean additive contributor to how people perform their work, rather than a backstop for automation. As AI capabilities grow, enterprises must rethink the work they do to make AI a generative part of the process, with trust and transparency at its core. Currently, only 23% of global organizations report that they are preparing their workforce for collaborative, interactive, and explainable AI-based systems.
  • The dilemma of Smart Things. Assumptions about who owns a product are being challenged in a world entering a state of “forever beta.” As enterprises seek to introduce a new generation of products driven by digital experiences, addressing this new reality will be critical to success. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of global executives reported that their organization’s connected products and services will have more, or significantly more, updates over the next three years.
  • Robots in the wild. Robotics are no longer contained to the warehouse or factory floor. With 5G poised to rapidly accelerate this fast-growing trend, every enterprise must re-think its future through the lens of robotics.Executives around the world are split in their views of how their employees will embrace robotics: 45% say their employees will be challenged to figure out how to work with robots, while 55% believe that their employees will easily figure out how to work with them.
  • Innovation DNA. Enterprises have access to an unprecedented amount of disruptive technology, such as distributed ledgers, AI, extended reality and quantum computing. To manage it all—and evolve at the speed demanded by the market today—organizations will need to establish their own unique innovation DNA. Three-quarters (76%) of global executives believed that the stakes for innovation have never been higher, so getting it “right” will require new ways of innovating with ecosystem partners and third-party organizations. Just recently, Accenture opened a first global innovation centre for situational awareness in Singapore. The centre will develop assets to enable clients to responsibly deploy innovative technologies such as AI, IoT, blockchain, augmented reality and virtual reality.

Disrupters are already taking steps to address the gap between people’s expectations and today’s standards. For example, startup Inrupt is working on a data-linking architecture called Solid, which is designed to give people more control over their personal information by allowing them to store and use their data across the web through “pods.” People could decide where their pods are hosted and determine which companies or machines can access them—revoking or deleting their information at any time, catalyzing Inrupt co-founder (and inventor of the World Wide Web) Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a web of opportunity for everyone. This is precisely the kind of human-centered approach that will define leading organizations in the future.