The Fourth Industrial Revolution

We are at the dawn of what some analysts call “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The World Economic Forum has defined this as different from The Third Industrial Revolution – that’s what many people believe we are currently in – because of scope, velocity, and systems.

In short, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is about the possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.

It has some good context and information. Brookings has predicted that the interconnectivity of devices and thinking/systems will power multiple nations for generations, with Africa specifically on the rise. COVID only accelerated some of these trends, with the manufacturing industry going digital faster than was initially expected.

Technologies like Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Automation are no longer experimental or on the bleeding edge. They are slowly seeping into the mainstream of computing.

Economics of the fourth industrial revolution

The advantages are obvious. These technologies have the potential to decrease cost, reduce (human) error, increase agility and flexibility to better absorb seasonality and other predictable and unpredictable work volume fluctuations.

Outsourcing, both back-office and front-office outsourcing, has traditionally had very similar goals: achieve cost savings, agility, and service excellence by letting process specialists handle key business flows. It’s no wonder then, that Conectys is determined to assist its current and future clients in the adoption of these technologies, as part fundamental building block of our outsourcing offerings.

This year, we hired our first Head of Digital, with plans to hire more digital consultants in the future.

We’ve begun working on some internal RPA projects, and soon plan to roll it out to clients and prospects, as we detailed in some newsletters that we deployed earlier this week.

If you’d be interested in talking about the advantages of automated projects and bots for your business, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re still in nascent stages with deployment, but growing rapidly. We’d love to talk to you about it.