Alexander Graf is CIO at HUBER+SUHNER, a Swiss-based high-tech manufacturing company. HUBER+SUHNER, with the vision of Connecting – today and beyond, is committed to addressing the immediate connectivity needs of people while contributing to shaping the future through innovative solutions. HUBER+SUHNER serves the three main markets of industry, communication, and transportation with applications from three technologies: radio frequency, fiber optics and low frequency. With 30 years of experience as an executive in global enterprises, Alex has always been keen to understand, explore and deploy technology, converting it into business value.
For more than 25 years, Digitalization has changed everything. The way we work and the way we live is totally different from what it was before. The invention of digital technology and its application to our daily life is mind-blowing. Just imagine to put someone into a time-machine and accelerate them fast-forward from 1970 to 2025 – how different life has become.
Obviously, Digitalization is a continuous change process, and due to the deep impact of digital innovation and rapid application of such technologies, something that can hardly be managed within corporate frameworks of line-organizations, governing bodies or project time-frames.
And now, into this already challenging business environment, AI has emerged at the heart of Digitalization and is likely to disrupt everything we tried to manage so carefully. Platforms, applications, UI, Data-Infrastructure and even human (user) behaviour will never be the same again.
Does this mean that it is time to relax and let AI run the Digitalization programs we have all been engaged in? After all, does not AI help us everywhere in decision making, code development, text generation and all those tasks we “digitalized” with high efforts and a lot of investments?
Listening to the continuous “hyperstories” of experts, marketing-teams and social media influencers, it is just a matter of time until “agents” take over and we can all concentrate on “strategy” … and maybe gardening.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that AI will be a great relief in many day-to-day tasks and beyond. Agents will help us to perform better and faster as a company. But it is also very clear that if you want to grasp the benefits of AI, you need to act now and implement AI into your Digitalization efforts – and welcome it as a booster.
Everything starts with data
“Data is the new oil.” Many of us may know this phrase from Clive Humby, dating back to 2006 and thus to the first “peak” of Digitalization just before the launch of the iPhone a year later.
And it is perfectly true that all Digitalization efforts need data to become reality. And the better understood, structured and applied data is, the more likely it is to succeed with a “digital” project. Companies in highly regulated or globally operating industries put a lot of effort into managing data in order to secure data protection, data processing or to fulfil compliance needs. Thus, the framework of “data governance” is already established in many companies and this set-up is also needed to utilize data for AI applications. In the end of the day, an AI-based “assistant” and its underlying LLM relies on (public or enterprise) data as much as an ERP system does on its data in generating a production order – with the important difference that the output can easily be judged as either wrong or right in ERP but could be “hallucinated” in AI. Thus, understanding and training of data and output in AI-based applications needs special attention and a human “scholar” to make the AI-assistant work correctly. This example is a good reference to the importance of data governance and therefore to lay the foundation of a successful application of AI. The good news is that AI can indeed also be used to massively enhance data quality and ensure data governance – which means that we can roll-out all (also non-AI based) Digitalization projects faster and easier.
People are people
It’s all about humans, in the end. Digitalization and AI have another common nominator, the desire to automate processes as much as possible and thus make them more efficient and effective without the costly interference of humans.
The impact of automation on humans can be twofold. Either work is “assisted” by automation (humans just have to confirm an automatically created output) or it is replaced. And both aspects have a massive impact on “us”. Yes, work (and life) is made easier and automation of processes greatly supports a more convenient work environment, to the extreme that “we” are not needed anymore to carry out the work. Think about robots (manufacturing) or agents (AI-based “assistants”).
This leads to the ethical consideration of Digitalization and, consequently AI. The higher the degree of Digitalization and thus automation of processes, the more likely it is to substitute human work. And the comparison with robots in a manufacturing process gives the best example of the impact of automation in this respect. GenAI brings this to the next level: even real-time decision making is possible given the vast amount of data available to make decisions based on facts and considerations of alternatives. AI agents will be used to interact autonomously and also start conversations and communication to each other and resonate on the possible outcome of a decision-making process. Are we exploring the limits of human consciousness? Although it is premature to predict the outcome, this prospect is both intriguing and somewhat unsettling.
How to boost your Digital Journey with AI
“Every process that can be digitalized will be digitalized in the end.” This phrase has been used extensively by tech/business consultants, and it has also come true in many ways. The degree of Digitalization reached a new level with the application of mobile-device based user interfaces, and I am convinced that “AI as a UI” will push this even further. Given that GenAI has some of its roots in natural-language understanding (NLU) and can do the same with almost any form of graphical input, it is very clear that we will interact more intuitively and conversationally with AI-based interfaces. The barrier to use more sophisticated applications will be further lowered, and as we have seen before, “assistants” and “agents” will execute tasks on behalf of humans. In order not to lose competitiveness, we have to adapt to these technologies, and the same race that happened with the introduction of the first computers, robots, the internet, or lately the mobile device, will start again. Either you adapt or you are out of business. Since the capability of AI is evolving fast, it is not easy to define the “right” timing for adaption. But with the availability of embedded AI features in enterprise software (Copilot-like functions) and the development of ready-to-use agents, the time to act is now.