As promised, here is the deck from my talk at CommunicAsia 2016.  Read the Business Times Review.

2020 global digital transformation communicasia Gerd Leonhard Futurist Speaker-web

UPDATE: Some snippets from the reviews of my talk:  TelecomAsia

Digital transformation isn’t just about technology – it’s also about humans, and telcos need to find the right balance between the two in order to successfully transform.  That was the message from Gerd Leonhard, futurist and CEO of The Futures Agency, during a keynote at the morning plenary of the CommunicAsia2016Summit on Wednesday.  Leonhard said that digital transformation is being driven by technology trends such as exponential connectivity (i.e. the Internet of Things), big data, intelligence (intelligent assistants and AI), and man-machine convergence. An example of the latter is the rise of the smart device as an external brain, and the cloud as a global brain. “This is changing how we interact with computers – we touch them and speak to them,” he said. “We’re seeing increasingly powerful combinations of man-machine convergence. The machine sits in the cloud and does all the work for you…. This is something everyone in the telecoms/IT value chain has to look at seriously, he said. “The purpose of business isn’t efficiency – it’s making customers happy. “All these algorithms and AI have to be balanced by ethics – it’s not a yes-or-no choice, but you need to find the balance between them” Leonhard stressed that he’s not a pessimist about the future of telecoms. “I think the future is a brighter place than Hollywood makes it look….”

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