The global economy weakened due to fiscal and monetary tightening, inflation, COVID restrictions, and the Russia-Ukraine war. However, technology has been a key factor in disrupting and innovating new sectors in an unprecedented way. As we embark on a new year, these areas are worth noting.
- Internet: The Internet transformed our world profoundly, and every industry is getting digitized!
- Web3 includes platforms and applications that enable a decentralized internet with open standards and protocols while protecting digital ownership rights and catalyzing new business models. The world is becoming more democratic and decentralized. The need for equality will have a great impact as diverse segments of humanity participate in decision-making, planning, execution, and maintenance. The crypto market is a leading example of decentralized initiatives.
- Digital first habits and remote work have ushered in an online-first era.
- Many interactions now occur online, bringing traditional community get together spots such as family gatherings, clubs, classes, etc. online. Many of the users care about how our skin looks and how we appear to the rest of the community we deeply care about on the Internet. Fortnite (an online video game) has V-Bucks, a currency used to purchase digital goods such as skins, emotes, etc. This currency corresponds to social tokens and virtual goods to Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) in the web world. Now, with platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, Reddit, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc., we can take these ideas from the gaming world and propagate them across the internet, beyond just games.
- While Gold is expected to regain value, it has drawbacks such as being produced in increasing quantities, difficult to store and transport, and historically risky to store in banks. Digital solutions like Bitcoin are creating Digital Gold on an open protocol network. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC-R or e₹, a digital currency announced by Reserve Bank of India) has picked up pace after the launch on 1st December 2022. 16,000 retail users of e₹ conducted transactions worth approximately ₹64 lakh (approximately $6 million) and average daily transaction for e₹ is ₹200 crores ($25 billion).
- For any local shop, digitization is a task too large to tackle on its own and too important. It is equally hard to catch up with the skyrocketing tech innovations! Online marketplaces will become increasingly important for small businesses. India has a trillion-dollar retail economy. Even if 10-20% goes online, we're talking about a potential shift of between 100 and 200 billion dollars. I'm particularly eager to see the results of India's ONDC initiatives and how partners play a key role in onboarding Kirana stores to ONDC.
- Social discovery through video commerce will become more prominent in 2023. Especially the role of influencers in marketing and advertising will continue to grow.
- Digital ads-based revenue has fueled the internet for the last 20 years, worth hundreds of billions of dollars from companies like Google and Facebook. In India, digital ads revenue is much smaller, at around 2-3 billion USD out of a total of 10 billion USD in ads revenue. India is likely to be more transaction-led in the future. Aadhar reached 1.3 billion people, 7.9 billion authentications and 1.3 billion eKYC . 700 million unique id linked bank accounts. UPI recorded 7.82 billion transactions worth ₹125.94 trillion rupees (approximately $1.5 trillion). FASTag did daily of 100 million transactions with ₹100 crores rupees (approximately $1.2 million) daily and ₹40,000 crores (approximately $5 billion) annual toll collections helping build better roads.
- Internet browsers are becoming increasingly powerful, allowing for complex use cases such as online development in sandbox environments, etc. I’m excited to see how the super app and browsers are going to offer seamless user interactions.
- Cloud computing has created new business models, spurred the growth of the digital economy, and created new jobs in the technology sector. It has also enabled people to work remotely, such as work-from-home and freelance opportunities. The likelihood of security breaches will increase for organizations that do not manage remote access.
- Cloud providers like Azure and AWS excel at two key scenarios: starting simple applications with low traffic during initial adoption phases, and dealing with highly irregular load peaks, such as when 100,000 users sign up to try the service instead of the forecasted 10,000. However, neither of these scenarios apply to high traffic and high processing applications. This is due to 1) the heavy premium user must pay in terms of usage to these cloud providers, 2) it being hard to shrink operations teams of heavily used applications just because applications are on the cloud, and 3) the clearly obscene margins reported by cloud providers like Azure and AWS, indicating that it is profitable to host servers.
- Cloud will expand to integrate with more edge computing involves distributing computing workloads across remote data centers and edge nodes to improve data sovereignty, autonomy, resource productivity, latency, and security.
- Cloud will offer exponential value in computational performance, transforming networks, solving complex problems, and making systems more secure with the advent of Quantum Computing Technologies.
- Mobile phone:
- India currently has more than 600 million smartphone users. The government's support for the BharatNet project to bring fiber-optic connections to rural and remote areas by 2025, as well as the proposed USD 10 billion (approximately Rs. 77,600 crores) incentive package to expand semiconductor production in India, are sure to drive up smartphone sales in India.
- By FY26, it is anticipated that the global mobile phone market would earn INR 2.4 trillion in revenue, growing at a 14.5 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), while the Indian mobile phone market is anticipated to increase in size by 9.7 per cent CAGR to reach 370 million units by FY26.
- 5G/6G cellular, wireless low-power networks, low-Earth-orbit satellites, and other technologies support a range of digital solutions that can drive growth and productivity across industries.
- Indias’ overall internet user base grew 4.3% on-year in CY2021 to 829.3 million amid rising prices of entry-level smartphones that slowed down 2G-to-4G conversion. 5G business services has a $17 billion revenue opportunity by 2030 for telcos in India.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a game changer in areas where humans have a ton of historic learnings, which helps Machine Learning (ML) consolidate insights across enormous historic learnings. This assists humans at population scale deliver high value, exceptionally reliable AI-aided decisions in a short time for areas where humans had great understanding and that helps humans focus more on solving problems humans have never seen! Reliable-AI is an epic evolution accelerator.
- Generative AI refers to systems that can generate content such as text, images, audio, or video based on a set of inputs. For example, using Generative AI startups can save time in creating customized ads, social media posts, generate reports, create music, identify bottlenecks etc. Examples include DALLE, Whisper, ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.
- The transportation industry continues to improve with traditional automation but is being disrupted by innovations such as autonomous driving. Autonomous driving offers real-time, high-stakes AI. This will improve the efficiency and sustainability of land and air transportation. Many learnings from AI for mobility will be leveraged in other areas, such as home automation.
- Smart humans and emerging global agencies of humanity:
- We have seen the “Great Resignation”, and massive layoffs across various industries. The way we learn skills and work is changing. With innovative technology like Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), we can improve skill training and eliminate mediocre skills. This will help create "smart humans" who can constantly learn and adapt throughout their lives.
- Although we have mostly had a peaceful era, military power is still used in some parts of the world like in Russia-Ukraine war, Israel-Palestine conflicts, Taliban insurgence in Afghanistan to name a few. Likewise, nationalists feel threatened by immigration, possibly because their valuable resources are being shared with unknown immigrants. This threat is exacerbated by various fascist perspectives, which further divides humanity! We must live together harmoniously! We need tools that will help us achieve this goal! However, humans at a population scale currently lack these tools. It will be a long journey to reach this goal, but I am hopeful that technology will play a major role in providing the necessary tools. I am also curious to see how we will navigate this journey towards a more harmonious society.
- COVID has brought to light the interconnectedness of nations and the shared nature of the human genome and the need for swift, coordinated action to find root cause and solutions that can be implemented at population scale across the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) played a crucial role in coordinating international efforts to combat the virus. With the advent of technology, we will see such global agencies getting more effective and swifter at population scale problem solving.
- To extend human lifespan, we will continue to see more breakthroughs in gene-therapy, gene-editing, genome sequencing, cancer immunotherapy, drugs, precision drug delivery etc. These breakthroughs will gradually become more widely accessible and affordable for everyone.
- Smart humans consume only what is of utmost importance. This is inevitable because of the clear climate and weather impacts on the planet earth. Clean energy solutions aim to drive net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across the energy value chain. Sustainable consumption involves transforming industrial and individual consumption through technology to address environmental risks, including climate change. This is a long journey and I’m curious how this turns out. There will be effective global agencies with a strong focus on recycling, reducing, reusing, and renewable energy.
