It seems easy to overstate. Another Industrial Revolution. Scientists, researchers, economists, and CEOs have been telling us it’s unfolding and it’s different and it’s unlike anything humankind has ever experienced before.
Leaders anticipate the Fourth Industrial Revolution to bring incredibly rapid change to technology and industry during the 21st century because of increasing interconnectivity and automation across most sectors. Popularized in 2015 by Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum Founder and Executive Chairman, he contends that the impending changes will be more than just improvements to efficiency; they will induce significant shifts across industries and markets. A significant aspect of these changes will be the intersection of technologies such as artificial intelligence, gene editing, and advanced robotics. According to Schwab, these capabilities start to blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds.
But aren’t these just grand proclamations for academics to spout and historians to label? What makes this Fourth Industrial Revolution so…revolutionary? What will this mean for small, medium, and large corporations who all have different stakes in the global market?
Instead of using broad brush strokes, let’s lean into the question of what value there is to be found in Industry 4.0. Today’s article will discuss 4 key sectors and companies already leading the way to capitalize on what 4IR has to offer.
Cloud technology and connectivity
The Internet of Things (IoT) has already brought connectivity to the forefront in a major way, and coupled with computational power, will continue to shape everything from supply chain to production facilities to domestic home life. Impressive progress has been made in AI technology of late because of the exponential increases in computing power, combined with the availability of vast amounts of data, from software used to discover new drugs to algorithms used to predict our cultural interests.
Ten years ago, way back in 2012, Capital One started its journey to build “a technology company that does banking instead of a bank that just uses technology,” as CEO Richard Fairbank stated.
Capital One acquired talented developers and programmers required to build apps and implemented agile software development, including the use of open-source software. The company also embraced cloud technology full force. In 2020, Capital One closed all of its on-site data centers and moved all applications and systems to Amazon Web Services. This cloud-only strategy helped the company get away from infrastructure and hardware management so it could focus on customer service innovation by using machine learning