Gerd Leonhard Keynote Dell - EMC: Next Is Now, Dubai'17

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Jerd Lenhard, who will talk about the future is now leadership, digital transformation and the future. Well, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here today. As I was listening to the discussion earlier, I was thinking there's one thing that's really important that we have to keep in mind. Your transformation is not the same than innovation. I've been doing this futurist work, I'll tell you in a minute what that actually is for roughly 15 years. And I live in Zurich in Switzerland. I do a lot of work in Germany and a lot of people in Europe think of transformation as making things better. But the fact is transformation actually is not just about making things better, it's about becoming somebody else. This is a tough mission. I used to be in the music business and I was a musician, producer, record producer, and I worked in the music business. And you remember the late 90s, we had a thing called Napster, you may remember Napster, free downloading. So it was clear in 1999 that music is going to go from the round discs to the cloud. That is transformation. And the record company said, you know, we're not doing this because if music moves to the cloud, then we lose control and we lose our money, which they have, but they could not refute it. Now, 10 years later, roughly 2012, I had the same example again with the car companies. We did a big seminar in Germany with the CEOs of a big German car company and we're talking about self driving cars, electric vehicles, car sharing, flying cars. We got laughter and transformation of the car business today is going from selling units, you know, cars, to selling mobility. Now that is one serious transformation. If you're in the music business, you know how much it is to be to buy a CD. If you buy CDs, you know, years ago, $20, 20 today, if you use a service like Spotify or others, is €10 for 21 million songs. Today you can't sell music, end of story. If you're in the music business, you got to sell something else. In this region, the biggest transformation is the end of oil in parenthesis. I mean, your own government talks about this a lot in all different regions. Here we're approaching this transformation away from this whole logic of the past to a logic of the future. So I'll talk more about that in a second. But that's just something I wanted to say. I wrote a book a couple months ago called Technology versus Humanity. I have a couple of free copies with me, so if you want one, come around later and I will share a few copies of that with you. The other thing about transformation is this. Let's not think for a moment that transformation is just about technology. It's not. I mean, the biggest transformation that we're seeing in society today is because of technology. There's culture, changing politics, changing economy is changing. Transformation is very much a cultural thing. If you're looking at companies that are successful, like Dell, EMC and other companies, it is because of their culture, the culture of innovation. This is very important when we think about transformation and where this will take us. So we'll talk a little bit about that later. And first of all, we're going to use an online tool today because I want to know what you think. So I love to give monologues, but I will also invite you to share. There's a place called mentee.com. we're going to use this tool so you can take out your second brain, your external memory card that you. You have here. I know you're working on those all the time anyway. So unfortunately, it will not work with the BlackBerry, I don't think. Just kidding. It does work with BlackBerry. But Menti.com allows you to instantly share your responses. So you can open the browser and go to menti.com, you don't have to download anything or it's very simple. And we're going to do a poll to where you get to submit. I'll just show you the login number shortly and then we'll get an instant feedback. Okay. From what you're thinking, that's going to come up in a little while. So first of all, what do I do as a futurist? As a futurist, I don't predict. There really is no such thing. Some people were able to do that, like Alvin Toffler, Arthur C. Clarke, the Jimi Hendrix of futurism. I observe there's really a great saying in China that says, if you want to know about the future, ask your children. But coming here every time I come to Dubai, I'm thinking about really what it is, is that the future is already here. It's just some of us haven't noticed here is a place where the future is everywhere in many ways. I mean, the museum of the future, it's a very interesting story. So really, what it's all about, when you think about the future, first we have to observe, we have to watch what's happening. You should spend between 5 to 10% of your time looking at the key things that are coming from the future. And if I asked you today, what are the key things from the future, would you have an answer? I think some of you would. Okay, first is artificial intelligence, machines that can think. The second one is robotics, machines that can do things for us. And not just robots, but also bots and software, AI. The third one is of course the Internet of things. Connected devices, sensors. And the fourth one is quantum computing. Machines can function a million times as fast. So observing that is really important. The second one is to understand. You know, there's one thing about humans that we are just infinitely better than any machine that currently exists. If I meet you in the hallway later or for coffee, it takes a human one second and less to judge, evaluate the other person without saying a single thing. We understand stuff, and understanding is completely different than knowledge. You know, Einstein, who was a really great philosopher also, he said imagination is more important than knowledge. It was easy for Einstein to say because he was very knowledgeable, but still, you know, understanding stuff. If you have kids, you want your job, your kids to have jobs in the future, they need to be understanding jobs, because that's human. It's very important to understand the human context. The other one is imagination. I touched on this. And the last one is to have foresights. Foresight is what you need, especially in this region, because your world is changing upside down in the next 20 years. Foresight is to mean to see things and not happen. So ask yourself that question, are your future ready? Because that future is coming so fast. I mean, it's mind boggling. When I first started working on the Internet stuff in the mid-90s, I started a company like Spotify in 1999 called Sonific. Didn't work because it was too early, but today, just about anything that you can invent is almost like science fiction has become science fact. Flying taxis in Dubai, well, let's see how that plays out. But language, translation, self driving cars, going to other planets, changing our genomes, that's all within reach in a very short time. It's very important to be future ready. So basically what's happening with transformation is that transformation is changing gradually all industries. So if you're in banking or energy or the insurance business, you thought you were safe. The same thing that happened to the music business and the printing business and the newspapers is going to happen to banks, insurance companies. And we can only learn from the music business. The music business went in 10 years because they said that they weren't accepting the change, didn't want to go with things they lost 74% revenues in 10 years. But that's quite an achievement, right? You have to, you know, 10 years going from, I don't know, 38 billion to 14 billion, and now it's going back up. So we can learn that from the music business, right? Basically, first wave here, music, e commerce, shopping. And now military, government, banking, energy, healthcare. You're extremely lucky because you can watch these old guys, what happened to them, and then you can reinvent the world around us. Health care, banking, insurance. The blockchain was mentioned earlier. There's no doubt that something like the blockchain will come along and wipe out 90% of transaction costs. That's certain. It is unlikely that a blockchain will be a true blockchain in the sense of no central control. That's just not going to happen. I don't think so. We'll see how that plays out. But basically here, very important, your ability to think from the future, not about the future. And each of us has to think from the future. Not 50 years, not 10 years, just five years. And what do you know about the world in five years? Actually, that's not so hard to know. We'll give you some examples. We have all these people in a recent survey saying robotics, 3D, print. 90% of people have access to the Internet. Roughly. There's about three billion now, three and a half billion. We're going to have almost six and a half billion people connected to the Internet in seven years. I mean, think about this for a second. The chances are pretty high that nobody or very few people will buy a car with a gas engine in 10 years. Of course, that is a cultural question. I mean, I'm from Germany, but people love their cars and the sound and all these things. So in Bavaria, you will still buy a car with a gas engine. But the kids of my kids will never know how to drive a car themselves. They'll just be driven in it. They definitely won't know CDs or, or DVDs. I don't know if you still buy CDs or DVDs. Maybe for some movies you do. But if I buy a CD and I give it to my kids for Christmas, they call a therapist, they're going to call the doctor because I have a mental problem. It's already moved on like this. We're looking at a world that is so vastly different. Seeing the world with new eyes. I mean, we're just about to become kind of superhuman. Augmented reality, virtual reality. A doctor that can see the medical information in front of his eyes while he's doing a really complicated operation with another doctor remotely coming in. I mean, it's all becoming, especially here, becoming normal hololens and all these things that are happening. Imagine the possibilities. I mean, this could be so good that in fact, it could be very addictive that you would not want to live outside this kind of augmented reality. So today it is no longer the oil, or to some degree, it still is the oil. I'll talk about that shortly. But technology is the driving force of society, and I think this is mostly a good thing. It's not always a good thing. I'm sure you can imagine why, for example, security and surveillance and all these things. But what is happening today? If you look at this chart, don't take it personal, but this chart kind of shows you what's happening on the left. Ten years ago, the biggest market cap companies, banks and oil companies. Today, 10 years later, companies with the most money, the most market power, the big technology companies, in that order. The next 10 are Chinese. Data is the new oil. You heard that before. I'm sure you want to make money in the future. Data oil. Very, very powerful. Oil is the global currency and trust is the thing that goes with it. This is a very important topic, I think, for the future, for this transformation that we're going towards into a new kind of society. As I like to say, data is the new oil. Artificial intelligence, machines that can think is the new electricity, and the Internet of things is the new smart grid. This is a key slide. If you want to make a business plan for this region, this would be it. Do it while you can. Considering what I've read about all the initiatives in the region, this is already kind of happening now. The most important thing is here. This is an ecosystem. Nobody's going to own all of that, regardless how big they are. This is something that we have to build together. And the most important thing is we cannot forget about the fact that humans aren't algorithms. This is very important. 95% of what we do has nothing to do with technology. Our interactions aren't really based on data, but actually putting that together is quite a mission. I think it's a huge opportunity. As I like to say, humanity will change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years. And I'm quite serious about that. People say, oh, you know, industrial revolution, the Internet, flying to the moon. 20 years, you've seen this, of course, a hyperloop right here from Abu Dhabi to Dubai supposedly being built. You probably know more about this than I do. But the hyperloop is a typical thing. Well, you thought that's not possible, and maybe it isn't, but I think it is. I mean, these are projects that are. The next 20 years will bring changes. Imagine the possibility of changing the human genome to avoid cancer. That's 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, or some kind of, you know, versions of this. So this is a really, really big thing that's happening. A huge wave of change in the future is no longer a time frame. It's a mindset museum of the future. This is very important for us. I mean, if we don't have the mindset of being ready for the future, we won't have a future as simple as that. And this is our biggest problem. For example, in Europe, I live in Switzerland, you know, where our mindset is the past. There's nothing wrong with that. You know, the past is a good thing, but we got to think about the future. There is no guarantee just because you were successful in the past, the same thing is going to work in the future. That's ridiculous, right? I mean, think about that for a second. The record companies and music companies were successful because they owned distribution and they forced the musicians to sell through them. The Internet came along and destroyed this thing. And now, in five years, nobody will even know who Sony Music is because they didn't find the new business model. This is the most important transition that we're going to face, and I think it's to 90% positive. Don't think for a minute when you're looking at this convergence of man and machine. Forget all the Hollywood movies that you've seen, okay? This is entertainment ex machina, all the other stuff. With very few exceptions, no machine is going to grow up and kill us. They may take our jobs. This is a different discussion. But it's a long way from a human being, from a machine being like a human. I'll talk about that for a second. But we're going to have new relationships. For example, we're going to start talking to computers. Well, that's already happening. 35% of American kids communicate through the mobile phone with a digital agent. So in the very near future, JIB will take about two or three more years to be mainstream. You're going to sit in your office, you're going to say, I want to invest $100,000. You'll just say it to. To your wristwatch or wherever, and it will go out and do that for you like an agent, like a person. The other day, I bought my first airplane ticket with a digital agent. I gave the agent access to all of my profiles and my email. And I said, I want to go to Puerto Rico and I want to go to Morrow and I want to get the cheapest possible business class. And they found me a deal in 14 seconds. Much cheaper, much quicker than I could have done in person. So this kind of communication with computers, the idea of what robotics are, I mean, robots will be as common as WhatsApp. They'll be as common as cars. In many ways, that's not such a good thing because it's going to change our world in many ways. But, you know, warehousing, for example, is already completely roboticized. Airports, pilots. This is a video here by Mercedes Benz, one of my clients. We're futurizing very heavily on the future of the car. They came up with an amazing. I mean, this happened all before I ever looked at any of this. But they cooked up this idea of what the van is going to be in the future. And this kind of looks like Blade Runner. Remember that movie Blade Runner kind of looks like that. Right. It's really funny, actually. But what they're saying in here, that they're no longer going to sell cars, they're going to sell a service, a platform. The car has drones, the car is staffed with a robot. The driver is like a supervisor. Yeah, okay, this is the future. It's not going to work tomorrow. But imagine a company like Mercedes Benz, the vans division, they sell at least 500,000 vans a year. And now they're going to be a platform. I mean, that is true transformation, the relationship of man and machine. Voice control. Get used to this. If you want to invest in, if you're a bank. And there's a couple of initiatives already in the region that I looked up that are in that direction. If you're a bank, insurance company, government, let people speak to your system. For example, the other day I was at a session for a company that makes televisions. I can't tell you which one, but it was amazing. We had a bunch of people in the 70s and 80s sitting down and this machine, you could speak to the TV and you could say, hey, I want to watch Frankenstein. Whatever. It would just pull it up and you could say 21st minute or show the background of James Bond movie or something. We just do it with voice control. That's our future. Imagine you can speak to machines that is about, in some cases, two, three, five years away. Great initiatives by many companies. We may soon forget what it was like when we could not speak to the computer. Is that scary or is that good? I don't know. You'll be the judge of that. Because. Because if we can speak to computers, we may think that they are human, which would be stupid, of course, right? But I'll give you an example. Alexa, ask my Ford mobile to stop my car with pin 2376. Sending start command to your car. Alexa. Alexa, what was the score last night for the Detroit game? Last night, Detroit beat Tampa Bay. Five, two, three. Well, I get the point. You can see this on YouTube, but using this digital agent called Alexa, you can speak to your car and you can say, well, you know, I want to get a cappuccino, get it organized, or I'm going to be late to the airport. Send a message and we'll do all that for you. You know what? It's going to do it. No matter how bad or good of a speaker you are and whether you're tired, it won't matter. Right now it matters because if you try Siri or Cortana now, it's really not that good. But very soon it's going to catch up, and that's going to be a very big difference. So our world is going to have two poles, and I think this is where you need to pay attention for our future plan. On the left, a lot more algorithms and intelligent technology, as we've heard before. But let's make no mistake about this. Human life and business is not a gigantic machine, even though some people believe that. On the other hand, we have what I call the andro rhythms. You know, andro and allegory. Andro being human. The human things, feelings, emotions, compassion, empathy, values, ethics, negotiation. You know, the things that are very hard to impress. For example, ask the simple question, what makes you happy? Or what makes a company happy? Or a country? The most happiest country in the world. You know where that is? Take a wild guess. Denmark, and followed by Switzerland. Now, if you ask somebody where I live in Switzerland, if he asked somebody whether Switzerland is the happiest country, they would just cry. Because it's such a relative thing, but very important to keep in mind. Our life is always going back and forth between those two things. Companies are not loved because they are efficient. I mean, if you speak to your clients, you're going to ask your clients, say, well, do you love what I do? Like, say, a telecom company, because we're so efficient. Nobody loves things because they're efficient, because of what you stand for, who you are, what relationship you have. I worked for a Long time in the telecom business as a futurist. And telecom companies are of course notorious for increasing value and trying to keep the arpu, but it's not really working that well because we have to create new values, new brands, new things. This is the most important curve of the day, the exponential curve. You've heard this many times before, Moore's law. And Moore's law for chips is kind of ending because he really can't make the chips much smaller. So now we're going to get into 3D chips and quantum. But really what's happening here today, in the beginning of this curve, where I was at 10 years, you don't really see very much at all. It feels like nothing is happening. But we're at the pivot point, we're at four. So now we're going four, eight, 16, 32 and seven steps to 128. 3D steps, a billion. I mean, our world is going to be exponentially different. It's very hard to comprehend for humans we're going to have supercomputers that are a million times as fast as what we have today in 10 years. This is why we can't comprehend, for example, the change of energy because that change is exponential. If we keep thinking linear and expecting gradual change, that will be detrimental. So think of that stuff doubling rather than gradually going up. And especially here in this region. I mean clearly that change thinking of the future as exponential. If you can think 10 years ahead, you're already 40 times as far as long on the curve. And we're talking about substantial changes with everything that we have looked at. So in this future, machines that are intelligent, definitive future. Now let's make no mistake about this. These machines are not intelligent like we are intelligent. They're actually very stupid. They're as dumb as a toaster really. But they can do things. They can open the garage. For me, intelligent assistance and AI can be the world player in. In Go, right DeepMind, Google DeepMind. Last year, four weeks ago, a computer beat the world champion in poker, which is a weird thing because poker is not really logical, it's just lying, basically. So, smart machines. I think the low hanging fruit for you right now is intelligent assistance. Ia not AI. That's machines that can help you do a job quicker and better, more efficiently. And that's everywhere. Google Maps, Gmail, Slack, all kinds of things. Some examples, here's a hotel company, this is in Barcelona, W Hotel. You can go and log in with your social media details and will give you a huge pin wall of things you could be doing today and what your friends are doing so you can connect with them. You've seen this one, right? Mashreq, the bank has a banking bot. Rather than going through the website, you can just do it through the message. That's intelligent assistance. Customize their things and of course recognizing objects like this Chinese app does. And now I think there's people from banks here in the room. Financial. Now we have the AI enabled bank, the intelligent agent bank. There's hundreds of companies working on this. Replacing low level financial transactions with intelligent machines. This is not rocket science. This is just very hard work in billions of cases called deep learning. Now we have the first applications that say that they can replace lawyers. Any lawyers in the room. You would probably doubt this. I think. I doubt it as well. But there are certain jobs that can be displayed. If all you do as a lawyer is non disclosure agreements, your future doesn't look that bright because a machine can do that. At least in many cases. That's the low hanging fruits I think financial advisors. If you work with a bank, you already know that every major bank in the world is investing in machines that can give advice. And some of you may be using TripAdvisor just as an example. TripAdvisor can be terrible or can be really good. It certainly isn't human, but it's valuable in some ways. And that's how I look at this. You can make a tool like this to help 10% of your customers be happy or that's great unless it costs you 10 billion to build it. So all these systems are already happening. The automation of knowledge work. If your future is just doing things routine jobs, machines will do it. That's the rule of digital Darwinism. Anything that can be digitized or automated will be. I'll tell you why that's actually good news. It doesn't sound like it's good news because it's about our work, right? But we're going to have systems that will speak to us in intelligent ways and give us suggestions. Well that's already happening. But this will be, this is where Google is going, for example, right? Google is not going to be a search engine in five years. Google will tell you what to do. It'll be your artificial brain. I mean this is a very, very powerful business. You can say well that's really amazing or is it creepy? I don't know, it's hard to say. I mean if you could have an assistant in your office that would be like a person and she. Or most of the time it's she the application who does all the work for you? Extremely powerful, if you can trust it. I call this the global brain. The possibility of having machines that do things for us in logistics, smart cities, energy, banking, insurances. Every organization will be impacted. There's some research saying that roughly by 2020, smart bots will power 85% of all customer service interactions. The other day, I was in India doing a talk, and I went to somebody's lab to try this myself, and I made some phone calls to the bot, you know, to the smart software for customer service to change a flight. Okay? And 8 out of 10, I could not tell that it wasn't the machine. I couldn't tell the difference. I mean, this was simple stuff. You know, you put in your pin code, your pnr, and then they look up for alternative. Sounds a little bit like. It's hard to tell, you know, when you're dealing with people who have accents anyway. But it was amazing. Of course, that system is. I mean, if you run call centers five to eight years, 90% of call centers will be automated. Ninety percent, because machines can finally understand language. In fact, now machines can speak like us too. This is the next step. You can have machines actually speak in your language. So bottom line is this, and I think this is good news. Technology is hell then, you know, hell and heaven. It's a great saying that technology is morally neutral until you apply it, until you use it. These technologies that we're dealing with today, artificial intelligence, sensor networks, human genome editing, nanotechnology, they have more potential for good and bad than nuclear power. I mean, these are very, very vast things that we can do. And on this risk level you see here on this grid, the benefits are very high, and the challenges are also very high. So here's a word of advice. If you're getting involved in this, you cannot use technology just to do technology. You also have to solve the external problems that technology creates. Otherwise, you get to a place where you're just inventing things. Because one of the things that we're facing today, you may have seen artificial flowers, for example, in a 3D printer or in a flower shop, you can buy artificial flowers. And they look pretty good, actually, but they're not real. So to me, artificial intelligence is kind of like an artificial flower. They're very useful, they're cheap, they're efficient, and they'll get better. They're not like us. I think if we understand this correctly, we can invest correctly in just the things that make it work. There. Alvin Turing, you know about the Turing Text, he said in the 50s. The question whether a machine can think is too meaningless to deserve a discussion. I think that has changed a little bit. But still we have to think of this as in that context of things. We are still very far away from machines thinking like us. We don't even know how we are thinking. I mean, scientifically, there is many, many things. Consciousness, sentience, whatever you want to call it, we don't know. So it's very good to keep that in mind. Basically, this is the Moravec paradox. Whatever is very simple for a human, it's very hard for a computer. Whatever is very hard for a human is simple for a computer. So where should you invest and go? Well, you give the computer things that are simple for the computer, like changing a ticket, like smart cities. You don't build computers that can do what I do or other humans do. So I think this is a good time for us to think a little bit further and do our first mentee. So please take out your weapons, your external brains, your digital tools. It's okay. You can take them out now. It's fine. I know you all have one. Just open your browser on your smartphone or tablet. This is instant. Doesn't take much work. Go to menti.com and now we can switch to the live version back there. Is it still there? There we go. Okay, we're going to see the result here. You can only give one answer and submit. You cannot pick several answers. Okay. The simple question is how do you feel about these exponential changes? So go to menti.com, put in the pin code 659247. Don't share your location, don't log in, don't download anything, and just hit the answer. How do you feel about these exponential changes? I know there's about 100 people in this room, maybe 80, so I cannot just see 27 responses. You're not future ready if I don't see that. Of course, there's a penalty if you don't actually. So I'll be looking at your tracking here. Very good. We have two people thinking or three people, that we're heading into a dystopian future. Whoever said that is welcome to out themselves in the discussion later. I see some nodding already. This could be. I agree, this could be dystopian if we don't control, could be an arms race of technology. But on the other hand, we have a lot of really positive. I mean, here's the interesting thing. When I do these things in Dubai and other around the region, I Get very much on the left hand of the curve, positive feedback. I do this in Germany or Switzerland. It's all in the middle. We're more concerned about that. It's a cultural thing. I think it's also hugely exciting. I'll put this together. We're going to distribute the PowerPoint afterwards, the PDF so you can take a look. You can keep voting. Let's switch back to the presentation. So I want to introduce you to the Mega Shift. They're a big theme in my book. The megashift is what we have to understand to really understand transformation. And we talk about digital transformation. Like whatever we don't really understand is transformation. Do you remember social media five years ago? It's like we just put everything to social media that we don't understand. That was social media and that's just normal now. So the Mega Shifts are these. They're not just digital, they're not just mobile. Most importantly this one, I think this is a huge opportunity for the region. Datafication and cognification, connecting things, making things smart, making processes smart, making logistics smart, making environment smart. I mean, that is just exploding. I mean the city of Los Angeles just three months ago connected all their traffic lights to a smart grid and an artificial intelligence. Well, this is really just fancy software that can analyze things, but this software analyzed a trillion movements of cars. And then it said, you know, if we switch the lights like this, we can save 12% energy and reduce pollution. Done. I mean, this is not mission critical like flying an airplane, okay? This is. If it goes wrong, you can still go back. So it's like flying in a taxi in Dubai in a self flying taxi. That's kind of. You don't want that to go wrong. You know, that's a very high stake, right? So cognification, the other one, of course, automation. I mean, if you're a telecom company, you're going to automate like crazy, right? Because now it's becoming possible that these tools actually understand what you're trying to do in network maintenance. This is a job killer. Let's have no doubt about this. Maybe not so much in the region, but in general, automation is a job killer. Automation is 100 times as bad as globalization or as good, depending how you look at it. Lots of social consequences to discuss on this one. Augmentation of people using augmented reality and virtualization and robotization. If you tick off all these boxes, you can invent a hundred things that will fit right in. And we're not talking about the artificial brain here or something really lofty like this, we're talking about really like stuff that works, that's being launched every single day. Great example is a smart grid, making the electricity and energy grid smart. Huge opportunity. Everybody needs it, everybody wants it. I mean there's companies working on this. The blockchain. Of course I would invest there, but I would not expect any return for 10 years. Digital money is coming. This is a certainty. The only thing that stands in the way of digital money is privacy. If you want every single transaction to be tracked and capped, that's a big discussion. Especially in countries where that is really a big thing. For example in Germany, predictive analytics, being able to predict customer demand. Those are all low hanging fruits of these mega shifts. 3D printing, it's about a couple years away that we will print out the spare parts for our cars, electric cars, of course. We're going to print out on a truck that comes by and delivers them. They will not be shipped from Taiwan or from California. They'll be printed on demand. That's already happening. Just too expensive. I work with some companies who are 3D printing food. Does it sound terrible? No, it's not actually terrible because you can put organic substances into the printer and you can print a pizza or cookies. I'm part of a trial where a company is trying to sell ice cream on the beach that is printed on demand. It's an ice cream machine that is programmed through the cloud, has all the components in it and you can print any variation you want, just with your own name on it if you wish, or with the name of your girlfriend if you want. So smart, everything. I like to joke, and this is a great opportunity for the region. I like the joke. Take any old business, put smart in front of it and you have a new business, the smart converter. Number one, smart energy, smart banking. That is an oxymoron, right? Just kidding. But smart insurance, smart logistics, smart systems, smart CRM. This is what lots and lots of companies are looking at as an immediate way of doing this, right? And here's a whole map of these shifts just to scare you any further. Sometimes I show these change maps to people like my wife or uninitiated, not tech people. And they would just say, oh God, 50 things at the same time. So I was looking at the region saying, you know, if you use the megashifts, what is the stuff that would be big for the region? Clearly, renewable energy, Internet of things, cognitive systems, robotics, blockchain, smart cities, health care, autonomous vehicles. But it's really just the whole list. Pick and choose. In 2016 was the first year ever where the data business, you know, anything to do with data, had made more money than oil. $7.8 trillion. I mean, it's totally clear where this is going. And you can debate forever how long it will take until oil becomes less relevant. Yes, we can discuss that. But it's really, this is the next hot thing. This is quite clear. It doesn't really matter how long it takes. And here's the powerful it requires imagination, Einstein. If you cannot imagine the future, you can't create it. This is why Americans are so good at creating the future, because they always make up stories. They believe in new stories and they make up stories all the time. This is why they make all these movies. And we have to think about our imagination. This is really keeping real aback because we don't like imagination. We execute. I was born in Germany, I live in Switzerland now. German people love perfection. And this is why they can't imagine anything within reason because it has to be perfect. That's not a good idea. You have to have imagined to get into the future. The other thing is safety, security, control. Now, when we talk about technology, safety, everybody's always talking about tech. I'm not talking about tech here. Clearly we're going to need lots of software and lots of security, and we're working on that. Clearly we're also going to need social contracts. What's okay, what's not okay, who's in control? Where does that data go? What are the key challenges? As we connect everything, safety and security becomes a huge business and a gigantic social challenge. Nobody will share their health records with the cloud, their DNA, their purchase habits, their car habits, unless there is a way of saying that not everybody can do whatever they please with it. So this is a huge opportunity, but also a very complex thing. The industrial Internet is falling in the same direction. New powers, new responsibilities. If you're going to get engaged with this, you're going to have lots of new responsibilities. I mean, think back for a second. A lot of companies that have engaged with this, like Facebook, they're not taking any responsibility. They have changed the entire media business. And they keep saying that they're not a media company. I mean, Google and Facebook makes 90% of digital advertising money and they say they're not a medium. This is kind of, you know, so responsibility is really important because that's what makes the ecosystem work. Okay, now I have another minty for you. Okay, this is going to be a little bit more complex. You get to choose with a sliding Scale from one to five. Okay. One is I think it's disagree and five is you agree. Okay. Now you get to slide back and forth and then submit. The question is really simple. We switch to the screen. What are the biggest opportunities in your region? You get the pick. So the list is big data analytics, energy genome editing. You can just slide from left to right. So disagree on the left, strongly agree on the right. Okay. And you don't have to answer all of them. You can just slide back and forth a little bit and then hit submit. And this will tell us what you think the future of the region is. I think I would have an inkling of what that could be. Since I'm a futurist, I would dare a prediction. Now, I suppose you can keep voting also while we're talking. It will just be the same system. If you've used it before, you have to refresh to get in. Right. You, you've noticed you have to put in another. What are the biggest opportunities? It's a race. Now, I knew you were going to say this, right? Smart cities, the Internet of things. And I agree this is a really, really big topic. It doesn't go without the renewable energy part though. Keep that in mind. They sort of married those two things. You know, I think in many ways when you're looking at these opportunities, it is not that we're suffering from too little opportunities or too little money. It's that we have too many opportunities. It's confusing to try to figure out which one to prioritize. So very interesting. We have again, we see in this result, you know, we have overlap and we have a lot of middle field also. I tend to agree with this. I think smart cities, the Internet of things, renewable energy, of course, they're intimately connected. That's a huge part of the future. Big data prediction AI. I will publish the results later and we'll go back to the slides so we can have a few more things. Thanks very much for contributing. So I'll finish with this topic and then we'll have a discussion. Okay, first of all, 84% of the world's energy today is oil and gas and coal and a little bit of nuclear, 84%. And OPEC says it's going to be that way for 40 years, more or less. But there's a different reality shaping up. Sheikh Mohammed Al Maqdoum said himself last week, not last year. Sorry. The goal is to celebrate the last oil barrel we export because we will be prepared for the day when it comes. Now that sounds like a Futurist. To me, it's quite a daring statement. That's like the music industry saying, we look forward to the day where downloading is free so they can make a new business model quite a challenge. So clearly what's happening is really this, what I call hybrid thinking. And this is very important for every business. You must do what is today because the money comes from what is today. And then you must do what might be tomorrow. If you only do what is today, you will not see tomorrow, at least not anymore now, because it's accelerating. So you have to think hybrid. If you're a bank, we have existing customers now. You know, the millennials, the kids that are about 25 now, they'll never sign up with a real bank. When they have real money, they go somewhere else. You have to think about what might be tomorrow. So here's the reality about solar. Solar energy from my friend Peter Diamandis. The curve is quite clear on the signs. We're going to reach the point in time when solar energy can supply a majority of the world's energy, probably in less than 20 years. The biggest factor there is the batteries, of course, not the solar. So as many discussions about this, even if it takes 30 years, that is basically tomorrow. That's your kid's job. So the future also means that we're going into a different world. If you take a look at what people really like today, it's no longer about buying stuff, necessarily about owning things. It's about services and experiences. This is one key. Of course, Dubai has already learned this. Creating experiences. That's what you have in Dubai already, the experience economy. If you're a telecom company, the future is not going to be to sell mobile devices where you charge by megabyte or by phone call or by flat rate. The future is going to be to sell experiences through the network. Media, entertainment, medical, health, banking, to go to platform economy. So here's the key question of whatever you're doing these days, especially if you're in government, right? The key question is, are you indispensable? Are you like oxygen? That's the question you have to answer. If you are not indispensable, you will be dispensed, right? That is also digital Darwinism. You can see that happening everywhere From Nokia to BlackBerry to certain car companies. You become dispensable. So I've been doing futurism for 15 years and I noticed five years ago roughly that we were coming into dispensable. We're becoming. Somebody can go online and get a really great Report put together by some online system. The other day I was in, in a lab in New York and I asked a smart machine about the future of Europe. And she gave me a 12 minute talk about the future of Europe. It wasn't really human in the sense. I mean, spoken was very nicely spoken, but a little bit stale, but very powerful. And then I asked the machine about a concept I'm working on called the United States of Europe. Well, it's a concept, right? The machine said command not understood because the machine can't talk about what doesn't exist. The question is, are you indispensable? Are you going to create a new economy? And here's a couple of really great examples for liquid immersive experiences and if you can invent that for your business and for government, of course. Great, right? Amazon has a shop now called Amazon Go, where you just walk in and you pay with your mobile connection. You don't see anybody, you just walk in and walk out. It's like shoplifting with an app. It's completely liquid and very powerful. It's like Uber. With Uber, you always feel like you're not paying because you don't have any money, but of course you're still paying. But very powerful liquid experience. Airbnb just launched a new division that sells trips and experiences. So you don't just rent the house, you can also rent, go on a desert trip with people, you add the experiences to it. Spotify, the music service, the most powerful tool is the playlist they make for you. It's called Discover Music, Discover Weekly. This list is so good. I used to be a musician and producer. The other day they put it together and on the list for Spotify, there were six of my own songs in the Spotify list that I had recorded with a different name. So it couldn't have made a match. It just figured I would like my own songs. And this is how good the playlist is. Very powerful. Google Gmail is integrating payments into Gmail. Talking about liquid and powerful. That's 300 million people with one stroke. If they can do it globally and to pay. Very liquid, very powerful. Here's Starbucks, where you can speak to the barista through the app and order whatever it is that you want. It's like a virtual barista. I mean, it's all very small stuff. It's not complicated really. I mean, in this case it might be, but. And here you have Babylon, which is in the, in the uk. Sorry about that. In the uk, a solution that allows you to speak to a virtual Doctor through the app so you can scan your skin. You can say, I got these weird things on my skin. What do you think it is? You go to the virtual doctor and it's basically free. Part of the national healthcare system. Very, very powerful experiences. Liquid, timely, human. So the bottom line really is whatever we invent with technology, we have to put this back inside. That is the real value of what we are. The real value is not to take the human out. In some cases, it is the value to take the human out because humans are inefficient. Right. But in most cases, to put them back in, in a better place. I work with a grocery store in Switzerland, a big chain of food stores, and they decided they're going to automate the checkout. That's, I don't know, 1,000 people out of work and they're going to let go, I think about maybe 100 or so. But the other 900, they're going to train to advise people in the store to buy healthier food. They don't let go of the people. They just put the human back inside. Very, very powerful proposal and idea. So in this world, you know, we are living in the world of abundance. We can do anything we want. More carrots all the time. More movies, more music, more. More trips, more options, more consumer empowerment. If you don't figure out how to create experiences, you become less valuable. So especially in banking, insurance, travel, telecom industry makes a great example. If you don't add experiences, eventually you just compete down to zero, lowest price point. So very, very important. For example, in the telecom business, we used to sell network and infrastructure as the biggest thing, but in the future, we're going to sell this. Services, experiences, platforms. That's why platform companies are so powerful. Marshall McLuhan said, It is a framework that's changing in the future, not the picture. Make no mistake about this. If you're looking to build a new future for this region, you cannot just change the picture. You have to change the framework. How things work, who you are and what you do. And platforms are the most powerful thing. I mean, take a look at what's happening in our lives, in technology today, the most important companies in the world are gigantic platforms. Amazon, Cisco, Google, Facebook, Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba. I mean, that is what's happening in our world in terms of the competition. So I'll wrap up with two final words and then we can get some questions. First of all, if data is the new oil, and I think it is, I think you would agree we must take into Account the externality of the business model. We didn't do that really with oil. We kind of did after a while, but there's lots of things that happened because of oil that are quite a problem now. I think we can agree now we have to say, okay, when we connect everyone all the time at high speed, we're going to have some issues. We need to address those. We cannot have a business model that just says, well, let's connect everyone, put the brain in the cloud and boom, off we go. It's not going to be that easy. We have to think about externalities. This graph kind of shows, you know, societal norms, ethics, technical standards. Otherwise we may get this right, we may become useless because we would be essentially replaced by what the machines do. A great book called Homo Deus that talks about this. Right now, I don't think we're going to be useless humans, but we'll have to think about the externalities and what it does. We have to put that plan. So when you have a business plan that connects people, you also have to have a business plan that says, what happens when they are connected? What do they do? How does our society change? What happens with our jobs? So I call this ecosystem thinking the Internet of things. Fourth industrial revolution. Data is in new oil. We must plan for the consequences. Security, safety, social contracts, you know, all the things that we need for that to go in the future. Because here's the bottom line. This may not surprise you, but technology doesn't have ethics. Technology doesn't care about what we believe in, what we want, our values, all the human stuff that we find most important. Technology doesn't understand, and it shouldn't. We have to understand that technology will not care whether it makes paper clips or makes an app that makes us happy. So very important for us to understand. Also the question, what should not be automated in government? This is a key question. If you work for government, many things can be automated because they're utterly inefficient. But should you automate, for example, decision making in the court? There's a first trial in America that says that a judge is replaced by a machine that decides who goes out on probation and who does not. The machine decides. The machine is on average, better than the judge. But is that a good idea? So that's a key question. So ethics, really, this is what I'm talking about. Ethics is the difference between being able to do something and what is the right thing to do. We cannot just cut that off and say, well, we'll do whatever we can. That could be quite dangerous. So I'll skip this because I want to get to the end. And we're already approaching the lunch session here. I can hear the clanking already. So very important. Here's the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world. I think it's actually the biggest company in the world, Walmart, 2.2 million employees. And Doug, the CEO of Walmart, he said the other day, as the world becomes more digital, which it does without limit, really, it will be our humanity that differentiates us and wins with customers. This is a very important message. You use technology, but you don't replace. You put humanity back in. You put the human back inside. Very much a key message. So I want to leave you with a key message that I learned from my musical mentor, David Bowie, who said he was a definitive futurist. He built the first Internet for Music in 1995. He said the future belongs to those that can hear it coming. I think we can take that literal. Maybe you heard of some of it coming today. And I want to thank you for your time and your attention. We're going to distribute the slides afterwards and I hope you have a good day. Do we have time? Do we want to take questions? I don't think so. I think the lunch is approaching very quickly, so I'm going to be here. You can ask me anything you want. I have a couple copies of books, so just let me know if you would like a copy. Thanks for listening.