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Thank you for a very interesting post! Completely agree that there should be a strong communication program, so that existing employees learn how to be take advantage of the new tech instead of feeling threatened by it. In fact, my understanding – without having worked in i-banking myself – is that a large part of the job is also to be a guidepost throughout the process for the client, e.g., meeting with prospective buyers. In that sense, tech should be an empowerment. There are still analyses to do, but for now I wouldn’t think AI is smart enough to know which questions that are the right to ask and analyse on. If anything, I hope the advancement of technology could help lower the workload for junior bankers … to hours that are a bit more manageable :).

Thank you for a super post!

As a fourth digital thread to the company, I’d add the emergence of new platforms like AR/VR. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how Activision should best respond? From BSSE, I guess we learned that it would be best to set up a separate team … but if the strength is in Activision’s strong franchises that it can leverage across platforms (e.g., Call of Duty, World of Warcraft) … I wonder if that is really the best way to leverage the strong set of universes Activision has.

Hey! Thanks for your comment. Agree – my understanding is that a lot of the firms are moving from a fee-based model to more of a % of value-add fee after the impact has been measured, especially on the types of cases that are more easy to quantify like operations improvement or pricing strategy. As analytics become more advanced to measure impact, I’d think more cases will be billed this way.

Tagging on to this comment … completely agree that user data could be used in interesting ways to personalize offerings. This is especially important for Wayfair dealing in experience goods, where eCommerce has not yet done a good enough job to substitute for the brick and mortar experience in discovering new types of product. VR/AR could change that! One interesting thought is if the customer starts using AR to see how new furniture will fit in her/his house, this will enable Wayfair to not only read browsing preference, but also understand what furniture the user currently has installed. Tons of interesting ways to use that data … of course with some privacy concerns.

Thanks for a great post! Intersting topic. One thought I have on this is whether our attitude to companies knowing “more about us than we do” will change over time as we become comfortable with data analytics. Maybe there are certain categories where we are more comfortable than others — e.g., Target knows that I’m training for a marathon (… noooot the case …) and sends me special offers on protein shakes (or whatever one needs for a marathon) vs the pregnancy example?

Interesting post! I like your point on getting more targeted marketing – I wonder though, if customers will have a negative reaction to Olive Garden sending ads revealing it knows exactly what you had last time you went there without consent?

Thanks of sharing this post – super interesting. You raise an interesting point – what happens in the end game when everyone has this technology in the NBA. If it then becomes about scouting raw talent, that can be digitized too. What can’t (at least in LIVE basketball) is the players themselves – I think that there are some forces in the sport that lead players to stay with the same team instead of transferring each season: it takes time to get the team to play well together as a team and also fans like to have some consistency in the roster. So maybe we need institutions in form of the NBA and the draft system to save us and help make sure that the it doesn’t become a winner takes all market … where good teams accumulate wealth, buy good players, get more wealth … and become unbeatable?

Yes! The Sweet Home is pretty cool. I also stumbled upon ReviewMeta.com and Fakespot.com, where you can just copy paste in the Amazon URL and it will tell you an adjust star-rating (1-5) based on its algorithms for detecting fake reviews.

Hi Juan – great article! I think that the long-term issues you lay out are very real, but I’m wondering if Spotify not also has some very urgent short-term challenges ahead. Specifically, I’m thinking that Spotify is being cornered as the only major music streaming service that doesn’t have it’s own HW: Amazon has been super successful with it’s Echo and Alexa built into third-party speakers like the Sonos One … and Apple just launched it’s HomePod.

If virtually all speakers become smart and those are owned – or voice controlled – by players that also provide smart speakers, Spotify seems to be in a pretty bad place.