If you are a Business 3 company, it’s time to take it up a notch because Industry 4 is here where tech adoption is happening at an accelerated scale, challenging traditional business models and giving rise to new ones, and if you look 'Through The Looking Glass', you can take lessons from other traditional industries such as electricity generation, retail and life sciences.

At the opening of Travelport Live in Bangkok earlier this month, Ananth Krishnan, chief technology officer at Tata Consultancy Services, spoke about how an Industry 4.0 world was emerging, driven by cloud, automation and AI, and how Business 4.0 companies were defined by three characteristics.

One, companies can mass customise the experience at unprecedented scale and accuracy in real time where every second happens at scale. (Think Uber, Spotify, Netflix)

Two, companies can create exponential value – a business transaction binary building block is at the heart of the model but you can layer that by creating products on a base transaction. (Think Grab now getting into groceries, bikes and everything under the sun they can sell to you)

Three, the creation of ecosystems. Supply chains have existed for 150 years but the idea of ecosystems had been notional and conceptual. Today, sometimes, the ecosystem is the company. (Think Airbnb or marketplaces like Alibaba, Amazon, Flipkart).

Business 4.0 companies, said Krishnan, tend to have a very different view of risk. “We (traditional companies) are trained to identify risks in our company and trained to eliminate or recover from them.”

Pointing to the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data scandal, he said, “It could have destroyed any 3.0 company. Data risk was perhaps a part of their overall risk strategy, the speed with which they have responded is noteworthy, and is a lesson for us.”

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