Europe Can Lead In Laying The Foundations For A New Reality

The gap between the digital and physical world is narrowing at a tremendous speed. Not everyone may be ready for this change, but business leaders must prepare now for a future where the seamless and often simultaneous movement between the two worlds will bring new opportunities to create more and more value for their organizations.

Let me give you an example of something amazing happening right here in Europe. With funding from the European Union, a consortium of hospitals, researchers, and start-ups have joined the Neurotwin project, an effort to build digital twins of individual human brains. Each twin will be used to help healthcare providers understand and predict triggers for neurological diseases and improve preventative interventions. This year, the project will launch two studies on people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy.

This example of how technologies and the convergence of the physical and digital are helping to reinvent healthcare also holds true for every industry and sector. This change will impact every business, and leaders must be prepared.

The next wave of business transformation will erase the demarcation between these worlds to fuse them into a new reality. The time to embrace these technologies is now, and the goal we should all be working towards is not incremental improvement, but a step change towards total reinvention.

Fertile environment for European tech investment

Fortunately, there is good news for European companies looking to invest in their technology futures: confidence among business leaders is growing, and so is the shift from cost-cutting, with more growth and investment on the horizon.

According to a recent Accenture pulse survey of global business leaders, European executives are not anticipating the same levels of impact from inflation as we saw at the end of 2022. Additionally, two-thirds of European executives are expecting some revenue growth for their organization, and eight in 10 executives expect the economy to begin recovery within the next 12 months. Executives in France are expecting a slightly quicker recovery compared to their neighbours.

This creates a fertile environment for enterprises to invest in technology and innovation. When speaking to clients, I am regularly asked about data, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, security and cloud as areas of priority.

Business leaders also understand the crucial role of technology in advancing progress toward international sustainability goals, which is underscored by the European Commission’s recent Net-Zero Industry Act to scale up the manufacturing of clean technologies in the European Union.

Next generation of technology disruption

The fusion of physical and digital world is the next generation of technology disruption. But the truth is there isn’t one clearly defined technology to invest in to reach this new frontier, even as we are already seeing incredible strides being made in the likes of quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and extended reality.

Businesses are intrigued by the recent ground-breaking developments in AI, and our research found that 98% of global executives agree AI foundation models will play an important role in their organizations’ strategies in the next three to five years. Further, nearly six in 10 organizations plan to use ChatGPT for learning purposes, and over half are planning pilot cases in 2023.Of course, this interest should not omit the need to ensure these technologies are responsible and compliant by design.

But this is not about having a standalone technology strategy ready. This is about designing a deliberate, holistic innovation strategy that targets the meeting point of the digital-physical world. And as the meeting point gets closer, enterprises will require a continuous and dynamic reinvention to adapt accordingly.

Opportunity to strike out on the road to reinvention

As our latest Technology Vision 2023 report highlights, this next generation of technology disruption is not about just digitizing the present but accelerating towards a previously unimaginable future.

The report provides insights that can help leaders and their organisations better understand what they need to do to embrace technology as the road to reinvention. It charts a path that begins with blurring physical and digital and continues through the intractable problems companies are starting to be able to solve.

The meeting of the two worlds will evolve dramatically over the next decade, but enterprises are already finding opportunity in specific circumstances—a digital twin for a single bridge, a robotics deployment in a hospital, or pairing a product designer with generative AI. In the automotive industry, a large European Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) has begun evolving the vehicle design and development process. Using virtual twin technologies, they have eliminated physical prototypes for some models and reduced product development time by months. Additionally, they now can accurately predict localized effects like material and connection failures, leading to an overall improvement in vehicle quality.

And as these innovations gather pace, we will see them grow into entirely new physical environments, such as new ways of working in the metaverse. Across all industries, business transformation will shift from creating isolated digital capabilities to creating the foundations of a new seamlessly shared reality. This future opens an ocean of opportunities for companies, not only to grow but also to do so in a responsible way. Business leaders must prepare now for this future and engage in a deliberate strategy to continuously reinvent their business.

Your path to act

The outlook of recovery and investment appetite among European executives offers us the opportunity to lead in laying down the foundations for this new reality, now and for future generations to come.

When we look at this next generation of technology disruption, we need to reflect on two points. First, will it be challenging? Of course, but it tees up the second point very nicely. After all we’ve faced (and are still facing) over the last three years, organizations have built a newfound resilience and confidence when facing change. Across the landscape, we are seeing enterprises make some of their most ambitious bets on technologies that will converge our parallel realities and shape the nature of enterprises, the future of science, the ways we design and manufacture products, and so much more.