Insights

For the last several months, we at Sonata have been working on our new digital business transformation approach ‘Platformation'. At its core, Platformation is about enabling businesses and organizations to adopt technology backed new business models and drive digital transformation.

The 13th Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE) event held at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in December 2017 threw up some interesting discussions around concepts ranging from the scale effects in Web Search, market and auction mechanism design to pricing of resources in the cloud. Keynote speakers at the conference included Vijay Krishna of PennState, Vijay Vazirani of University of California Irvine, Ariel Procaccia of Carnegie Mellon University and Tim Roughgarden of Stanford University.

The set of 'born digital' companies such as Uber, Amazon, AirBnB, Alibaba have provided lessons in digital disruption to the rest of the world. We live in the digital world where market disrupters are developing platforms that facilitate exchange between the customers and makers, partners or even peers, reshaping industries into interconnected ecosystems.

With the recent controversy involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, there is increasing pressure on companies that are dealing with data to deliver superior business and customer outcomes. Not just social media networks, but any company in the process of digital transformation. This includes firms leveraging new technologies and platforms, such as drones, AI and autonomous vehicles, to deliver value.

Artificial intelligence (AI) relies on big data and machine learning for myriad applications, from autonomous vehicles to algorithmic trading, and from clinical decision support systems to data mining. The availability of large amounts of data is essential to the development of AI. Given China's large population and business sector, both of which use digitized platforms and tools to an unparalleled extent, it may enjoy an advantage in AI. In addition, it has fewer constraints on the use of information gathered through the digital footprint left by people and companies.