Evolve or Perish is the new Mantra for Business Leaders. The pace and the scale of disruption shall be so immense that business leaders and industry captains will have to keep a keen eye on the developments happening within their own industry as well as peripheral segments which can have an impact on their business.

The biggest disruption presently being undone in the automobile industry is a good case for study. With the onset of electric cars, the conventional Car Repair workshops will vanish over a period of time. Petrol /Diesel Engine-driven car has almost 20,000 individual components. An electrical Vehicle has less than 50. In future, Electric cars will be sold with a lifetime warranty and will be repaired only by authorised outlets.

Faulty electric motors are not repaired in the conventional car workshops teaming with Mechanics, but will be sent to an automated Repair shop that repairs them using Robots.

Even the ubiquitous Petrol Pumps will go away. Street corners will have Power meters that will dispense Electricity. In fact, they’ve already started in advanced countries like Sweden, Denmark etc. Major Auto manufacturers across the world like Honda, Toyota and Samsung have already invested Billions of Dollars to start building new Manufacturing plants that will only build Electric cars.

Another casualty of this change shall be the Coal Mining industry. Petroleum companies too shall lose their iron grip. Is the Middle-East is heading for trouble?

With solar energy generation and storage becoming economical by the day, smart homes will produce and store more Electrical energy during the daytime and will consume only a part of the power generated & will sell most of the power back to the power grid.

The future, an Era of disruption, is approaching faster than most of us can handle.

What happened to Kodak and Polaroid will happen to a lot of industries in the next 5-10 years… and most people don’t see them coming. Digital Cameras were invented around 1975. The initial models only had clarity/ resolution of 10,000 pixels but improved vastly following Moore’s laws, as it happens with all futuristic technologies

It will now happen again (but much faster) with Artificial Intelligence Medical Diagnostics, Autonomous Electric cars, Online education, 3D Printing, Hydroponic Agriculture will change the world, beyond imagination.

Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and 3D Printing has already disrupted and will continue to disrupt most traditional Manufacturing industries in the next ten years.

Interestingly, UBER is just a software company- they don’t own any cars and Uber is now the biggest taxi company in the world. Ask any taxi driver if any of them, saw that coming. Similarly, Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any hotel properties. Ask Hilton or Meridian Hotels if they saw that coming.

Artificial Intelligence: Computers will become exponentially powerful & more accurate in understanding all facets of the world. IBM Watson already helps Doctors in diagnosing Cancer. IBM Watson is many times more accurate than human Doctors. Facebook too, now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become far more intelligent than humans.

In 2020 several models of self-driving cars are already launched. In the next five years, the entire industry will be disrupted. You don’t need to own a car anymore as you will call a car with your mobile phone, it will show up at your location and will drive you to your destination. You will not need to park your car you will only pay only for the driven distance and you can be productive while being driven in a driverless car. The younger children of today’s generation will never get a Driver’s license and will never own a car

This will change our cities because we will need 90% fewer cars. We can transform parking spaces into green parks. About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide including distracted drivers or due to drunk driving. We now have one accident for every 60,000 miles of driving. With Autonomous driving that will probably drop to 1 accident in 6 million Kilometers of driving. That will save almost a million lives worldwide each year.

Most traditional car companies will doubtless become financially unviable, with their current business models. They will try the traditional evolutionary approach and try to build better cars, while Tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will take up a revolutionary approach and build a Computer on wheels.

Look at what Volvo is doing right now. No more Internal Combustion Engines in their Cars starting with the year 2025, using mostly Electric Motors, with the intent of phasing out hybrid models. Engineers from Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla. Look at all the global companies offering Electric vehicles. They were unheard of, only a few years ago.

Insurance companies will have massive trouble Without many road accidents, the Insurance Premiums will crash. The car insurance business will taper down with the passage of time. Real Estate Business models will undergo a drastic change. Because if you can work on your Laptop while you commute, people will abandon their down-town apartments, to move far away to more beautiful and affordable neighborhoods in distant suburbs.

Electric cars will become mainstream by 2040. Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run mostly on Batteries. Cities will have a much cleaner Ambient atmosphere, with no pollution. And clean air as well.

Renewable Power will become incredibly cheap, apart from being clean. Solar power production has been on an exponential growth curve for the last 30 years, but you can now see the burgeoning impact. And it’s just getting ramped up with the price of Solar Power (per Kilo-Watt-Hour) falling down every year.

Health:  There will be Tech companies which will build Medical devices that work on your Mobile phone, which can take your Retina scan, your blood sample and you breathe into it. Then, they will analyse Bio-markers that will identify nearly any Disease. There will be dozens of Mobile phone apps for Medical Diagnostics.

WELCOME TO TOMORROW’S WORLD.