Before investing in any shiny new piece of tech for your business, Augusta Hitech CEO and founder Karthik Pichai suggests asking what problem that resource will solve.

1. of1 4
What Every Business Leader
Must Consider Before
Introducing New Technology
“Leaders looking to upgrade their business technology should ask themselves this
question before taking the plunge: How will this resource help make us better?” Check out
what our CEO Mr Karthik Pichai says
Business history is littered
with remnants of established
companies whose one small
misstep put them behind
some startup and forced
them to play a pointless
game of catch up.
In the current business
climate, this scenario plays
out on a constant loop due
to a seemingly endless array
of new and disruptive
technologies. Some
entrenched companies like
Sears never manage to pull even with the pack.
Legacy names like Walmart, however, are fighting
back by reimagining their customer experience with
the help of digital partners.
For good reason, the possibility of falling behind puts
many business leaders on edge. Unfortunately, the
responses to this fear are often knee-jerk attempts to
keep up with the latest tech trends without any
KARTHIK PICHAI, CEO OF AUGUSTA HITECH

2. of2 4
thought into how those innovations might actually
better serve your company and its customers.
The result is often a hodgepodge of aborted projects
and poorly implemented technology that not only fails
to address the issue at hand, but also leaves the
company behind schedule, which is what it wanted to
avoid the whole time. No matter what emerging
technology is being experimented with – be it
automation, AI, or blockchain – it often causes
businesses to stumble when they should soar. And it
doesn't have to be that way.
What keeps technology and business off the same page
Investing in technology isn't solely the domain of tech
companies. Look at Goldman Sachs, an investment
bank and financial services company that employs
more engineers than tech-focused brands companies
like Facebook and Twitter.
However, when companies whose services don't
center on tech attempt to implement it into their
operations, many face the same two barriers: They
either recognize the challenges that come with
adoption or realize they don't know how to deal with
said issues. Every company encounters its own
unique challenges, but these four are common for
organizations struggling to integrate emerging tech
into their business models:

3. of3 4
1.C-suite leaders don't have the time or resources to
sufficiently explore emerging tech.
2. Business leaders can't define an actual application
for the tech they're attempting to implement.
3.Internal innovations teams are too small or lack the
necessary knowledge to properly evaluate and
recommend the right tech for the problem.
4. Leadership is overly cautious or unwilling to
commit to unknown and unproven.
Any sort of innovation needs buy-in from leadership,
especially technology. C-suite members can't just
tolerate the adoption of new technology. They have to
be the driving force behind why it's useful and what
good it will ultimately do for the company and the
people it serves.
Determine what needs to be solved
When struggling with tech adoption, it almost always
comes down to what companies say instead of what
they do. Specifically, many companies stumble in
adopting new tech because they're not asking the
right questions. Rather than asking "should we
embrace this emerging technology?" leaders need to
pose this question: "How are we using this technology
to solve our business problems?"
When working with blockchain, for example, my
company didn't view it as some cool technology to

4. of4 4
test. Instead, we identified specific use cases for it,
augmenting it with legacy technology like enterprise
resource planning to create specific and usable
products. As a result, we've built more than five
successful enterprise blockchains and plan to work
on more.
Embracing tech for tech's sake – quite frankly – is
bad business. Too many companies latch onto the
latest trend without actually asking the question of
whether it's useful to them.
A business needs to understand the problems it's
facing and then look into how emerging innovations
can possibly solve it in a better way. Will blockchain,
for instance, save you time or money? Will it drive
new revenue? If the answer to either question is no,
then maybe it's not worth your company's time or
effort.
Many challenges come with integrating new
technologies, but the deal-breaking ones usually
come from the same source: The failure to link a
specific technology to a specific business solution. If
you know what you're putting your efforts toward,
you're more likely to be successful and lead the
competition – instead of playing from behind – for
years to come.