What types of problems can be solved using technology? This question is at the heart of Japan’s initiative of Society 5.0. Society 5.0” is vision of a human-centered society where high integration of cyberspace and physical space can promote economic development and solve social issues. Society 5.0 advocates that sufficiently advanced technologies (Robot-ics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Thing (IoT), Blockchain, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Hybrid Cloud et al) can also solve persistent social problems, influence societal innovation.
In Society 5.0 humans has access to intelligent tools, enabling to create and capture value directly in new communities, networks and ecosystems. Benefits of value driven ecosystems include a deeper understanding of human engagement behavior through richer data. By combining data with AI and machine learning, organizations are spreading intelligence from the core to the edge to turn data into action and action into value.
Connected industries ecosystems in Society 5.0_recording-2.pptx
1. Promoting economic development and
solving social issues within connected
industries ecosystems in Society 5.0
Elizabeth Koumpan
Chief Architect Source-to-Pay
IBM Global Business Services
Anna Topol
Chief Technology Officer, Distinguished Engineer
IBM Research
IBM Academy of
Technology
The rapid evolution of Information and Communications Technology is bringing drastic changes to society.
Society 5.0 represents a vision of industries creating new added value and solutions to societal challenges by connecting a variety of data, technologies, people, and organizations during the global rise of the internet of things (IoT) & artificial intelligence (AI).
The goal of Society 5.0 is to transform commerce and workforce requirements to a point where individuals can appreciate life minus all potential limitations.
Sharing the data is the key in this concept, allowing business and society to deliver new innovative personalized insights across multiple connected ecosystems.
Society 5.0 is the vision for a human-centered society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space.
Society 5.0 follows the hunting society (Society 1.0), agricultural society (Society 2.0), industrial society (Society 3.0), and information society (Society 4.0).
A goal for Society 5.0 is to free humans from everyday cumbersome, mundane or dangerous work and, through the creation of new value, enable commerce ecosystems to provision only those products and services that are needed to the people that need them at the time they are needed, thereby optimizing the entire social and organizational system.
Balancing data sharing with preserving individuals’ and businesses’ privacy and confidentiality
The elimination of systemic disparity in data and AI models to enlarge the value pie for all ecosystem participants.
Services are produced and developed in cooperation with people and according to actual demand among the relevant segment
In a human-centric model, organisations share situational awareness and segment data to serve people (customers) based on various network-based collaboration models.
Future-proofing is done in cross-sectoral cooperation and increasingly through collaborative development between the public, private sectors.
The way people work, learn, buy and how businesses interact with their consumers, partners and one another will be forever changed. COVID-19 demands a new level of data gathering and management. Pandemics demand collaboration beyond the public sector involving enterprises, expert SMEs, and coordinating non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
The economy has taken a hit.
In the middle of March 2020, foot traffic to stores was down by around 20 percent in the UK and by more than 70 percent in Italy and the US (compared with the same period last year). The payment wallet industry is also affected, with some leading apps in Asia reporting 20-30% less flows, despite the growing number of users.
As the world tries to adapt to the changing situation with the COVID-19 pandemic, economic indicators point towards a steep drop in growth expectations for 2020 and 2021.
The supply chain is struggling to keep up
The food supply chain is highly reliant upon SMBs, but SMBs are very vulnerable to breaks in their supply chain and delays in their cash flow.
SMB revenue in the food chain, especially in retail are significantly down.
Food waste is a massive issue. Global food loss and waste amount to between one-third and one-half of all food produced. In low-income countries, most loss occurs during production, while in developed countries much food – about 100 kilograms (220 lb) per person per year – is wasted at the consumption stage.
Merchants are struggling with payment processes. With COVID-19 the merchants are looking into new ways to handle payments will be at an advantage. Merchants will need to seek the partners that have capabilities to increase transactions and reduce the complexity of payments to allow them to refocus on selling goods and services.
Consumer behavior is shifting. While consumer spending is down around the world, how and where consumers choose to spend their money has also shifted, and the reduction in in person transactions has driven a surge towards digital payments.
Improved SMB Resilience – Leverage socio-economic data and consumer buy / spend habits to provide better business planning analytics to smaller participants in the network
Alternative demand supply chain - Adapt supply chains to alternative societal demand sensing sources. Rethink traditional inventory visibility and optimization approaches to build a network where traditionally competitive suppliers make surplus inventory readily available.
EnahncedDigital Payments & Bartering - Simplify payments with digital wallets. Leverage ”stable coin” platforms, micro loans and e-bartering to level the playing field around access to electronic payments. Integrate the payment system with the network.
As the world tries to adapt to the changing situation with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Utilising new data that can be more easily captured and carried with transactions can inform and shape new services, and better overall understanding of customer behaviour, leading to increased personalisation and an array of added features.
The goal is to move toward the Discovery-driven enterprises
Discover new insights & factors for exploitation
Identify novel data and validate hypotheses
Continuously feed and augment downstream
Discovery (exploration) continuously enhances business decisions and operations (exploitation)
Planning for Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) and looking ahead to future events that can have positive or negative impacts on the business
To anticipate changed in a complex environment. Main forces: economic environment, Technology, Currency, social order/unrest, corruption, natural disasters, government stability
Requirements:
Automatically generating multiple scenarios that explore unanticipated outcomes and/or unanticipated ways to getting to those outcomes.
Find where an important event/impact hasn’t yet happened, or happens in a new/unanticipated way;
Help decision-makers go beyond their comfort zone and encourage them to consider new/different outcomes, and/or new paths to outcomes
Reduces bias Expanding scope by bringing in a diversity of causal perspectives and mechanically generating scenarios tends to identify unbiased results.
Build Causal models that are accessible to anyone, and easy enough for most people understand and contribute to. This breaks down the perception of the “black box” and humanizes outcomes.
Resolving the problem
Use deep neural network-based language models to extract from documents the causal knowledge needed to craft inciteful planning models
Provide analysts with what-if exploration of plausible futures
Employ current state awareness, to provide hints about where to focus what-if scenario analyses
EXTRA BACKGROUND: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2018/07/ai-scenario-planning/ or https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?id=9444
The Scenario Planning Advisor (SPA) is a technology created by IBM Research that automatically projects many plausible high-impact future scenarios, to provide insights for strategic decision making. SPA allows domain experts to generate diverse alternate scenarios of the future, enhancing their ability to imagine various possible outcomes, including unlikely but potentially impactful futures.
Unlike most forecasting approaches, SPA does not rely on traditional statistical forecasting techniques. This is especially important where a key event or impact has never happened (or happens in a new way) and where little or no data exists from which to forecast its occurrence. Instead, SPA uses Artificial Intelligence Planning to generate scenarios, and uses Natural Language Understanding to extract knowledge from documents to craft the planning models needed to generate the scenarios. SPA provides the ability to engage in what-if analyses – whereby users identify risks to be explored – and SPA generates, prioritizes, prunes and presents scenarios that can be instrumental in strategic decision-making. SPA also employs current state awareness, to provide hints about where to focus what-if scenario analyses.
Potential users of SPA engage in Scenario Planning, to help them envision and plan for important future risks and opportunities. They look ahead to future events that can have positive or negative impacts on the business, and look for ways to:
encourage/promote/enable the positive impact
prevent the negative impact
remediate, where prevention isn't possible or doesn't work
Accelerating Trends
Global supply chain networks are long, heavily interconnected, and have many hidden dependencies
Broken links prevent matching supply with demand
Better visibility in the financial, supply needs and dynamic partnership forecasting is required across the industry
Solution: One4All Platform
Creating strong relationships with consumers that are both physical and emotional by leveraging multiple connection points and personalized communication with highly-connected customers.
Industries are dealing with a disruption in the supply chain as a result of the outbreak of COVID-19 and as a result many weak points have been exposed.
Resolving this requires rethinking traditional inventory visibility and optimization approaches
Digitization is still happening in pieces, leaving large parts of businesses digitally disconnected or still heavily reliant on high touch manual process.
There is a need to identify alternative demand sensing sources over regular market-driven sources to reduce both waste and product shortfalls.
Supply chain management has transformed from purely operational logistics siloed function to an independent function focusing on the integration across the company with advanced planning processes
Supply chain management complexity created a greater need for a more seamless integrated supply chain to collaborate effectively and real time with partners outside the organization with the ability to gather and share data to all other participants within the value chain.
The appeal to the food producers/providers (farmers, distributors, retailers and restaurants) will be in waste avoidance, which costs companies Millions every year.
This requires rethinking traditional inventory visibility and optimization approaches to build a environment where competitive suppliers make surplus inventory readily available centrally.
A payment is no longer a payment, but an integrated offering of processing money movement along with services to optimize the way merchants do business to deliver the "integrated payment," including features that range from inventory management integration to invoicing.
If we move in tomorrow world and considering current situation - there is less and less actual currency money going around, more digital currency, frictionless payments - linking physical and digital world, and digital wallet disruption, digital bartering – exchange of services in lieu of funds.
To make the platform stickier to the users, the payment needs to be seamless and integrated into that whole process so that participants do a full end-to-end transaction without coming off the platform.
Team Findings and Conclusions
Accelerate plans to reach unbanked or unserved customers who are increasingly unable to use physical payments methods, explore capabilities that give customers and businesses more insight and control over their finances and payments, reducing friction and enabling customers to progress with their businesses and lives – is the way to move in Society 5.0.
Using digital currencies can reduce cost, speed settlement, and serve as a foundation for digital wallets to reduce friction in payment services. Digital currency is not the equivalent to cryptocurrency and can be used with or without use of blockchain.
In the current environment it is difficult to manage the complexity of transactions between sellers and buyers. They are complicated by rapidly changing business interactions, supply chains, emergence of B2B payments and complex regulatory landscapes. Governments also have issues with managing payments and invoices related to corporate taxes. This provides opportunity for implementing digital invoicing (e-invoicing) technology.
With COVID-19 the merchants are looking into new ways to handle payments will be at an advantage. Merchants will need to seek the partners that have capabilities to increase transactions and reduce the complexity of payments to allow them to refocus on selling goods and services.
COVID-19 exposed the complexity and fragility of global supply chains. Broken links prevented matching of supply and demand. Lack of information has inhibited dynamic adaptation to the new requirements and rules, resulting in large economic damage.
Many ecosystem leaders and participants lock-in captured data behind their firewalls to gain a competitive advantage, raising barriers to entry for potential new competitors. In order to further grow, these businesses need to share the data accumulated and engage in new business models.
Cross- industry information sharing, adopting the common use of shared infrastructures, expanding areas for cooperation, will help to further the development of advanced AI systems to solve social challenges, promoting competitiveness and establishing new industry structures.
It is expected that AI technology will spread widely throughout society in the future, and enable improvements in convenience and productivity, social and structural challenges that society has not been able to deal in the past.
Value frameworks need further refinement to be more sensitive to reflect the natural capital, social capital and cultural capital arising from human interactions with ecosystems.