Leadership Panel:The Third Trigger of Change, Can Enterprises Survive with Current Operating Models?

Nothing dictates real secular change to enterprise operations more than financial pressures. We are rapidly arriving at a third major trigger that will lead to the evolution of many autonomous enterprises where leaders have no choice but to drag their operations out of the dark ages. Trigger 1: 1995—The internet drives globalization. The advent of the internet at the turn of the millennium drove the first major wave of globalization of business and operations. Trigger 2: 2008—The Great Recession brings about mass low-cost offshoring of IT. In 2008, the Great Recession drove a 15-year wave of tremendous offshoring growth based on using lower-cost labor to slash costs. Trigger 3: 2023—Inflation drives organizations to supplement or replace human labor with autonomous technologies. In 2023, wage inflation, recession, and people refusing to return to the office will drive a considerable wave of autonomous enterprises based on using technology to perform the tasks of humans to stay afloat. These critical topics are up for debate: Which enterprise leaders will succeed and which will fail as we tackle this global assault on everything we once knew as stable? Are enterprises adapting to this new recessionary world post-pandemic? Or are most clinging to the rules of the past? What will our world be like when we emerge from these dark times? As we stare recession in the face and contemplate our very survival, how does this impact investments in emerging tech and innovation? What gets back-burnered, and what moves to the forefront? And what happens to sustainability in all this mayhem? Can enterprises deliver where governments and consumers have failed? What do we need to do? Can today’s service providers convince enterprises to work with them differently? Can we get past the old-world “effort” partnerships to ones of performance and purpose? How do we truly become autonomous and remove humans from loops they no longer need to be in? Can we really adapt to a truly autonomous environment and embrace change? Or is it time to blow up our operations and take a different approach?