“Autonomous technology”, I know you are now sitting in the back seat of an auto-driven car, in a bustling city like Mumbai, doodling in your A5 diary or just journaling! Most minds, like yours and mine, immediately capture this image of self-driving cars, imagining how travel can become more restful, safe, and leisure-generating for us all. Hold your horses, autonomous technology’s reach is far wider, deeper, and higher than this notion of no-driver cars.

Autonomous technology is about enriching automated systems with sensors, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and analytical capabilities so that they could make independent decisions based on the data they collect. It has the power to not only transform our driving experience but also play a crucial role in our auto-auto future!

Here are 4 specific reasons why the future of technology is autonomy and how it will transform the lives and businesses in the coming years:

1. Products for GenZ One can’t now develop that old Facebook and expect a GenZ individual to show the same interest! We now see 3 years olds operating iPad and asking their mother if they were once a resident of her belly. This generation is born autonomy friendly. Building an Ethereum Blockchain and providing a use case might now be the type of experience they need. Complex technologies form their veins and neurons, they are at odds with something so basic as a social media platform that only allows you to chat, call, like and share! If brands are preparing products and services for the future, they need to be more future-ready. Financial investments into R&D, building, and scalability will be taking over the top hill in the minds of companies and entrepreneurs. Brands need to be future-ready to provide the auto-auto life that the future generation requires.

2. Real-life use cases An appointment was booked for you with your client through Calendar, now your air ticket is booked with Goibibo, and you travel to an Airbnb, through an Uber, on the way watching a series on Netflix (pre-downloaded by Siri), meanwhile you get a notification that reads, “Reliance strikes highest”, Siri sends an e-mail to all your clients about the same, then rings an alarm for you to take your medicines. And certainly, you didn’t do anything out of the above tasks except for sitting on your flight and car. How easy life is? Generating use cases, delivering the experience through products and services, and reducing the hustle in the real world is what the future needs (or maybe more). Technology needs aggregation of human data, drive automation, and bridge the gap between real life and technology. Brands need to march to providing use cases and leverage automation to aid real-world outcomes.

3. Empowerment of humans Amazon, Walmart, and FedEx are racing to deploy Robots (which are becoming more complicated, smart, and advanced) to assist their warehouse workforces and conduct redundant and mindless chores. Mitigating interactions and empowering humans to focus on more mindful activities while machines take over the burden of repetitive and risky tasks. Autonomy brings products that, create a streamlined user experience, conduct complicated tasks passively and hence empower humans to enhance the entire supply chain making it more agile and resilient by affecting the accuracy and timeliness of product information in a positive manner. Brands, by using autonomy, can enhance everything from inventory procurement to product delivery. Those already on the track shall move towards advancement.

“That is the only way to it. You have to win on autonomy.” -Elon Musk (Tesla)

4. The secure brain The future of technology is autonomy and in order to move into an autonomous future, we need to ensure we can TRUST TECHNOLOGY to work autonomously, we will need to develop protocols and contracts to safeguard data and ensure security to truly empower humans to sit back and focus on other activities. The technology industry will have to figure out how to create a “BRAIN” that can run all of the technology, and that brain must be SECURE. Developing a clustered AI with consensus validation of decisions, the one used with the proof of work or proof of stake model with smart contracts and blockchain can be a solution. Moving ahead, brands should question the cloud. Is the cloud aging? If hardware is becoming efficient every year, then why send the data for computing on server farms?

It isn’t all roses! Autonomy shines down hope on all of us. But not all of this technology shift is basked in the glory of angelical warmth. AI, ML, and IoT — these aren’t just buzzwords straight out of some Arthur Clarke’s high-fantasy, Sci-fi thriller book. Doubts like will robots become self-sufficient? Will software get so smart that if you programmed it to take your dishes from the table at 2, even if you are still eating it will take it away from you? Will jobs be lost to algorithms and data aggregators? Is there a possibility that your business could go extinct since Al-driven software can do a better job than you and your team can? Sadly, it’s all possible. For that reason, brands shall KEEP MOVING!

Keep Moving Autonomous technologies are in a state of flux. The goalpost is shifting constantly. In this dynamic technology landscape, it is the brands that should make the right technology investments, adoptions, and implementations. Autonomous technologies have the potential to bring huge transformations, given the rate at which they are developing. The world is entering Web3, if we are really serious about staying at the top, embracing autonomous technologies, such as IoT, ML, AI, AR, VR, etc., and learning more about smart contracts and blockchain is extremely critical.

The technologies are here to stay, but how we choose to engage with them will determine the future. Ultimately, this is a unique moment to embrace growth and change, leveraging the future of tech to create inductive products and services that support business objectives, improve the lives of humankind and enhance future growth potential. In essence, autonomy will not only steer the future in the right direction, but it will also put you directly in the back seat of your car and drive you on the path towards a promising future.

Hope you found this article helpful!

~Jill Pujara