The shape of future business

Business will look very different in the future. The traditional forms of business that we are used to, will be replaced by technology-driven, entirely digital business tomorrow.

Retail business will no longer be carried out in brick and mortar stores nor in malls, supermarkets or hypermarkets. They would have gone fully digital. The friendly neighbourhood Kirana shop will disappear. Instead, online retailers will deliver all that we need, directly to our homes, without us having to step out. The futuristic online retailers would be hyper-huge. Hyper-huge Amazons, hyper-huge Flipkarts, hyper-huge Alibabas and so on, all of them many times their sizes today.

The business of travel and transportation of the future would also be very different. The Uber model would become ubiquitous. Controlled and managed by technology, their owners would own no infrastructure nor any movable or immovable assets. Assets would be owned and belong to the crowd, with technology being used to put crowd-owned assets to maximum use.

These zero asset companies would use digital technology to control and manage such crowd-owned assets as if those assets were their own. Such businesses would form the core frame of travel and transportation businesses of the future.

Digital travel will take other forms as well. Driverless cars and taxis, driverless buses and trains, and pilotless planes would rule the transportation business. Pilotless planes could be scary for many, and there might be a need to put a man or a woman in pilot's uniform in every passenger plane only to avoid discouraging the more nervous passengers from avoiding flights altogether!

Drones would take over the transportation industry. Large passenger drones will replace intra-city and inter-city travel, cutting terrestrial traffic jams but perhaps choking up our skies and scaring birds away. There would also be small drones that can transport one or two persons–a personally owned cadrone (that's a term that I just made up) - that would replace the cars in our garages.

The Uber model would also be the frame for restaurant and food delivery business in future. Preparing breakfast, lunch and dinner at home–that for centuries has been a daily routine for us–would become an ante-diluvian chore. There would be no need for kitchens in our houses and they would disappear from our homes. Future generations would look at the design of today's homes and wonder how anyone could have been cooking in one's own home and spending so much time and trouble doing so. They will wonder at the prodigious waste of having to dedicate precious space in every house for the purpose.

Artificial Intelligence will become big business in future. They have already made a small entry into our homes through Alexa. But they would become a bigger and bigger presence not only in our homes but also in our offices, board rooms, policy and decision-making platforms of business, industry and government. There would be artificial intelligence sitting in the office of every CEO and CFO–and all the way lower down and higher up–that gives its advice based on the algorithms of past decisions and the world-wide knowledge that such intelligent non-beings can bring in through their global online networks.

The business of banking will be completely different within a couple of decades. Already bank branches are becoming smaller and smaller, with minimal staff manning them and fewer customers visiting them. Online banking and ATMs have already ensured that. With Fintech–the digital technology related to finance–taking over and driving banking, physical bank branches of brick and mortar as we know today will completely disappear.

Blockchain technology which has already made a small inroad into the banking industry will be omnipresent in a couple of decades. Indeed blockchain technology has the possibility to do away with banks altogether; at least for carrying out everyday banking activities. Therefore, there is the possibility that the banking industry may itself become extinct in the next three or four decades. There will be no more banks anywhere in the world!

Coupled with the disappearance of banks, the physical currency will also disappear. Currency notes would be replaced by crypto-currencies like bitcoins. Indeed, governments would completely switch over to cryptocurrencies doing away with printed notes. That would be an altogether unthought out form of demonetisation!

There would be no need to have high-security presses to print currency notes or mints to mint coins. Instead, governments would mint, or mine–mining I believe is the mot juste, the right word to use–their own cryptocurrencies in a completely demonetised digital currency world.

Manufacturing will change with 3D printing taking over most of our manufacturing needs. 3D printers will print out tables and chairs and all other furniture that we need in our homes. Indeed they would print out houses–those ones without a kitchen, remember?–for us to stay. 3D printing would also print out computers, laptops and phones et al. Why, 3D manufacturing may also print our cars and buses and trains and aeroplanes in the future.

Baiju would be the teacher of the future. And as Baiju develops, teaching as we know it today will become obsolete. Consequently, there would be no need for schools where children would have to be packed off to, every day. They can learn at home or in the park or wherever, turning on Baiju.

Baiju will not be restricted to children in schools. Baiju Senior will replace the teacher in colleges and universities. A new form of Gurukula–should we call it Baijukula?–will take shape and teachers and professors would become redundant, replaced by the future Baiju. Thereafter the extinction of colleges and universities would not be far behind.

The future business of health and treatment would go digital. Doctors will mostly disappear and, therefore, would most medical colleges. Hospitals will disappear. Instead, when we feel unwell we will consult a doctor online, who will prescribe the necessary medicines for us, which would be delivered to our homes by an Uberised pharmacy. And very soon thereafter, diagnosis and treatment would get even more digital. A small digital chip inserted in our bodies would continuously send all our vital information to an Artificial Medical Intelligence sitting somewhere out there, which will continuously monitor our heart-beat, pressure, temperature, digestion, kidneys, et al. If things are not going as they should, the Artificial Medical Intelligence would prescribe treatment themselves or refer us to an actual human doctor who will order our treatment online. The treatment would be delivered to our homes by health to home dispensers who will send the necessary nurses, paramedics and doctors to our homes for treatment.

Surgeries would go robotic. The need for a human surgeon would happen–as our judges would say–only in the rarest of rare cases.

And speaking of judges, the justice system will transform digitally. Courts as we know it will disappear. The opposing parties would simply have to file their petitions and counter-petitions into an Artificial Judicial Intelligence, which will examine the facts, claims and counter-claims with reference to the law of the land, and the precedents already set, and deliver judgement in seconds. Unfettered by human errors and prejudices, and delivering Justice that even King Solomon could not have envisaged, this Artificial Judicial Intelligence would make Judges and courts extinct in a few decades.

All these may seem a bit unreal and remote now. But at the rate of change that is happening today, these transformations are bound to occur in some 30 to 40 years. The world will be an altogether different place then!

The tragedy is that when these changes occur, the uneducated and the illiterate, and those too old to keep up with the change, will be left behind, marginalised, unable to survive in that fully digital world.

My only solace is that in 40 years I would thankfully be dead and gone.

(The author is a former Indian and UN Civil Servant. He belongs to the 1978 batch of the IAS and worked with the ILO in India and abroad for 20 years. The views expressed are strictly personal)