Out of global crisis comes a new world of opportunities.
This past year, business models have been reinvented. Supply chains have been restructured. Promises of new scientific breakthroughs have been suddenly realized. Productivity, we now know, can thrive virtually.
In the process of tackling global challenges that even the most forward-thinking leaders never fathomed, organizations have transformed.
How do we capitalize on this new momentum? How do we accelerate the innovation we have tapped? How do we optimize for the new global reality?
Signals of business change
Business Futures is Accenture’s structured approach to identify Signals of business change that are most critical for organizations to understand in order to shape successful futures.
We highlight the Signals that are reshaping organizations globally and will be critically important as these organizations reinvent for a profoundly different tomorrow. In presenting these Signals, we aim to help leaders chart their best courses to profitable growth.
What’s going on
Rather than focusing on the past for insights, organizations are increasingly looking forward.
Rapid shifts in operating environments and human behavior mean that the historical correlations some analytical models rely on have been challenged. To find new patterns in data and better anticipate future decisions, new data sets—including real-time data from across the value chain—are being processed by new analytic approaches based on artificial intelligence (AI).
We call this enhanced approach to decision-making “learning from the future.”
Why does it matter?
Learning from the future can open up new growth opportunities—an area companies often struggle to get right. We found, for instance, that only 31% of the executives in our survey said they are completely confident in their ability to foresee, and respond to, behavioral changes that affect demand.
New sources of data and AI-driven models can be applied across companies’ product development and sales life cycles to give them greater confidence that they are on the right path to growth.
At the same time, learning from the future can help companies prepare for risks. Engineers, for instance, are applying AI to leading indicators to make infrastructure more resilient against climate change.
What to do
Companies are not being held back by technology: Improved access to diverse sources of granular data and advances in modeling techniques mean that the right predictive tools are increasingly available. Instead, organizations are being held back by mindset, cultural, and organizational constraints—and their approaches to decision-making.
Read the full report at https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/consulting/business-change
