Business Archives

Developers, Investors Takes Flight to Industrial Real Estate

Industrial real estate is fast emerging as the go-to asset class for investors and developers, as demand for special economic zones (SEZ) wanes and India’s consumption and e-commerce story gets a boost from the government’s Make in India initiative and the goods and services tax (GST).
In a bid to build industrial, logistics and warehousing parks, industrial clusters and townships, there is a rush to buy land across states, something that hasn’t happened since the SEZ frenzy more than a decade ago. The warehousing and logistics sector, which attracted investments of more than a billion dollars in 2017, is gearing up for the next round which is expected to witness higher interest in building businesses around steady rental income.

At the top of the list is Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management Inc., which has invested in residential and commercial office real estate and is now evaluating opportunities in the industrial space.

“Brookfield is looking to invest in logistics parks. It may invest in a company or buy the facility or park itself,” said a person familiar with the company’s plans, who did not wish to be named.

A Brookfield spokesperson declined to comment.
Scouting for land is on in western India, including Mumbai and Pune, as well as in the national capital region (NCR), Gujarat, Chennai and Bengaluru. Sydney’s LOGOS Group and Assetz Property Group from Singapore, which partnered in 2017 to invest $400 million to build logistics and industrial parks in India, is shopping for land. Ben Salmon, co-founder and chief executive officer of Assetz Property Group, said they are planning to close at least three or four transactions in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

“We have a customer-focused, long-term, annuity model approach where we will build logistics parks which get less rent but are focused on servicing companies, and may also do industrial parks for non-polluting, light manufacturing which attract higher rent and are more specialised,” Salmon said.
Niranjan Hiranandani-promoted Hiranandani Communities is planning to launch a 250-acre industrial park in Talegaon, Pune after it recently got approval for an integrated industrial area. The firm has another 300 acres near Chennai and 77 acres in Nashik.

“It’s a big opportunity for us and we are in it for the long run. India wasn’t ready for this even five years back but with the government’s push to promote manufacturing and GST this is the right time,” said Hiranandani.

Maharashtra’s industrial policy is in fact based on the premise of providing an exit route to developers stuck with SEZs owing to difficulties in land acquisition, changes in tax laws by the central government. Last week, in a major policy bailout for long-stuck Navi Mumbai Special Economic Zone Pvt. Ltd, the Maharashtra government allowed the promoters to convert the 1,842-hectare SEZ into an “integrated industrial township”.

“There was a lot of exuberance around SEZs but not many gained from them due to less demand, more supply leading to the inevitable fall. A lot many things are in order today, making industrial real estate more practical and doable,” said Sanjay Dutt, CEO, operations and private funds, Ascendas-Singbridge India.
Ascendas-Singbridge Group manages 30 million sq. ft of industrial space across Asia-Pacific, and plans to build 15-16 million sq. ft of warehousing and logistics space in India in the next five to six years with Firstspace Realty, jointly investing $600 million. Embassy Industrial Parks Pvt. Ltd, a collaboration between realty firm Embassy Group and an affiliate of Warburg Pincus, is looking to buy land in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi, the sweet spot being 25-30 acres in each city. By March-April, it would have 10 million sq. ft of developable land.

“Buying land is not easy but we are building our business the way Embassy built its office park portfolio. It helps that we are allowed to draw long-term, cheaper debt after the logistics space was granted infrastructure status,” said Anshul Singhal, CEO, Embassy Industrial Parks.
Lodha Group is also planning to develop a 150-acre logistics and value-added industries park in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), as part of its aim to have $1 billion of assets under management by 2021. The location is 45 minutes from Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) and half an hour from the upcoming airport in Navi Mumbai.

“We are in the process of finalizing our business plan and partner and expect to start work on the site in the next few months,” said Abhishek Lodha, managing director, Lodha Group.

Mahindra Lifespace Developers Ltd will develop two industrial clusters – 264 acres in north Chennai (with Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo Corporation) and 268 acres near Ahmedabad, apart from earmarking 500 acres in Mahindra World City, Jaipur for industrial development and aggregating land outside Pune.
“The larger question is how will manufacturing demand play out in India?” said Anita Arjundas, managing director and CEO, Mahindra Lifespace Developers.

Healthcare Groups Refined the Single-payer System in California

The focus of the testimony was SB 562, a single-payer bill that was approved last year but then shelved. The bill would establish a system by which the state would pay for all healthcare and essentially cut out insurance companies. Taxes would increase, but supporters maintained that would be offset by the elimination of insurance premiums, copays and other costs.

There are some legal hurdles that would make switching to a single-payer system difficult, according to a report from local public news outlet KPCC. The rules that govern the Affordable Care Act, for example, are all federal, so any changes would require negotiation with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

California’s Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, relies on both state and federal funding, and the feds have the final say. Plus, there’s Medicare: It’s a federal program, so California can’t make changes to eligibility, financing or benefits without a thumbs-up from Washington.

There are also a couple of state laws that would make things thorny — such as Prop 4, a 1979 law that limits how much tax money the state can keep. Above a certain threshold, funds have to be returned to taxpayers, and it would require an amendment to the law to make healthcare exempt.

Supporters of the bill, including the California Physicians Alliance, say it would be worth the effort. One of those supporters, economist Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told the committee Wednesday that the state would have to raise about $100 million in additional funds to cover the cost of single-payer, but that most in the state would end up paying less for healthcare because insurance-related expenses would be eliminated.

Other supporters include Health Access California, the California Immigrant Policy Center, Small Business Majority and the California Labor Federation.
Opponents of the bill — including the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Medical Association — say there’s no responsible way to pay for a single-payer system.

The committee is expected to produce a report by this spring with recommendations on how to proceed.

Amazon,Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase

The announcement of the healthcare partnership between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase is either the major disruptor everyone in the industry has been awaiting or means little except to the three companies involved. Since the firms have given no indication of what they’re planning, everyone is reading into the collaboration.
Reaction has been like a Rorschach test, Kaiser Health News Chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner said during an America’s Health Insurance Plans forum Tuesday morning. People in the industry are either excited or scared.

“They’re focused on managing cost, also on that patient or employee experience,” said Tracy Watts, a senior partner with Mercer, during Tuesday’s AHIP panel discussion on employer insurance coverage. “Think about how the experience on Amazon is different than how we access healthcare delivery. I look forward to what they come up with. I don’t know if it will be dramatically different.” The Adis Group CEO Lyndean Brick said the whole thing is a mixed bag.
“Some are excited and others think it doesn’t mean anything. I think it’s reasonable to think that payers have to pay attention to this,” Brick added. “There’s the theoretical possibility that this could take insurers out of the system.”

Payers welcome this as an opportunity, according to Miki Kapoor, president and former CEO of the Tea Leaves Health division, which was recently acquired by Welltok.

“Payers are saying ‘it’s a jolt that was needed.’ I believe payers know there is always going to be a role for them. They want to evolve so they remain at the center of care.”
Many in the industry believe Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase will cut out the insurance middleman for coverage for their combined 1 million-plus employees.

Shares of Anthem, Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, Humana, Aetna and Aetna’s potential buyer, CVS Health, along with pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts, tumbled after the Jan. 30 announcements before the stock market took a general steep drop on Monday.
Analysts have viewed the $69 billion merger between Aetna and CVS Health as a preemptive strike against what many believed would be an announcement by Amazon that it would enter the pharmacy services business.

Toby Cosgrove, former CEO of the Cleveland Clinic who now serves as an executive advisor, said during a precision medicine conference this fall that the industry was concerned about major forces in the supply chain, notably “Amazon coming at us in purchasing.”
HIMSS CEO Hal Wolf said that, even short of details at this point, the fact that Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan have come together to address employer-related healthcare is intriguing.

“Depending on how this new idea gets positioned and where they go with it, the company could have an impact on a lot of health systems that have their revenue driven by payments in this same space,” Wolf said. “That’s why they have to hurry up and get faster with digital health.”
Wolf also said that he anticipates more companies outside healthcare moving to disrupt the industry in interesting ways.
“I don’t expect it to slow down,” Wolf said. “I think we’ll see more and more combinations in the future.”

JPMorgan Chief Executive James Dimon publicly tried to calm fears, saying the deal would only serve the employees of the three firms, according to The Wall Street Journal. But JPMorgan also confirmed that it welcomes others to get involved after JPMorgan spokesman Brian Marchiony said in the same WSJ report that the bank has “had hundreds of phone calls and emails from client CEOs, doctors and healthcare administrators looking to see how they can get involved.”
On a Thursday earnings call, Cigna CEO David Cordani said the deal is “presenting more opportunities than not.”

Cordani talked about the importance of its U.S. commercial employer business as a “very attractive growth opportunity.”
Should the Amazon partnership go in the direction of taking a million-plus lives out of the commercial insurance market, and should it welcome others to get involved, insurers could find they’re covering more higher risk beneficiaries.

Cordani indicated that Cigna has been thinking for some time about the future direction of the health insurance industry, and it’s not the same old model.
“Clearly the announcement was not lost on us,” Cordani said during the call in response to an analyst question on the Amazon call. “So stepping back I think one way we look at the announcement is, it reinforces something we’ve been talking about for quite some time, which is – it’s a pretty dynamic industry and the older orientation around focusing only on insurance or a fee-for-servicehealthcare delivery model is just fundamentally not sustainable as employers and customers demand more.”

That reinforces the imperative of focusing on transparency, alignment and a demonstrable way to drive healthy productive present employees and making the employer’s business better and more effective, he said.

The main threat, or opportunity, presented by the Amazon deal is the ability of the online giant, backed by data and funding, to fundamentally lower the cost of healthcare, and to target insured employees in a personalized, digital way, better and more effectively than traditional providers and insurers.
“If I bought books on Amazon two years ago, they still know what I like and need. I think Amazon is around changing the dynamic,” Pfizer CMO Freda Lewis-Hall, MD, said at the same precision medicine summit attended by Cosgrove.

She likened the industry’s efforts to delivering Star Wars advancement in a Flintstones’ system.
Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway, however, will have the ability to manage employees as patients outside of the four walls of the healthcare system, Kapoor said. They will be able to influence behavior and measure those choices.

But the bottom line is that they chose to do this because they became frustrated with the cost of healthcare, he said. “Healthcare is breaking our economy,” Kapoor said. “I think these titans of industry have said, ‘we’re going to do something about it.'”
Brick said, “They’ve acknowledged they’d have to bend the cost curve. The way to bend it is to take out the middleman. They have the infrastructure. They can have their own little ecosystem, have Amazon deliver drugs to a person’s doorstep. They can buy providers.” The present system is regulated and fragmented to the point that it can’t really innovate, she said. “If we can innovate in an ecosystem like this, I think there may be some good examples that come out of this that are able to be adopted by the rest of healthcare,” Brick said. “I’m excited about this. It’s a public acknowledgment that employers are going to take charge and try and fix the system.”

5 Essential Requisites to Surmount within the IT Sector

Information Technology (IT) sector is one in all the foremost competitive however well-paying industries in Republic of India that employs nearly three million professionals associated generates an annual revenue of roughly $150 billion in keeping with the Indian whole Equity Foundation. Despite the business size and revenue, it remains ferociously competitive amongst professionals for top paying positions.

One of the basic qualities of the IT business is that it evolves apace. Considering this, technologies like massive information, Machine Learning and AI has reworked the lives of the many finish users within the past decade. The speedy evolution of technology demands that professionals operating within the IT sector unendingly upgrade their skills to stay valuable to employers and to outmatch the competition.

The necessity of getting domain experience to achieve this sector makes it essential for current IT professionals to re-skill in domains that ar prized by technical school firms. experience in domains like information Science and internet Development can stay of high price to firms and in keeping with business estimates, there’ll be a inadequacy of over seven million qualified information Scientists and internet Developers globally by 2021.

Some essential traits professionals should absorb and learn to outmatch within the IT sector ar elaborate below:

Proficient in Writing
Professionals, United Nations agency need to achieve success within the IT sector, should knowledge to code well. moreover, IT professionals United Nations agency grasp quite one writing language have a foothold over their peers. Programming languages like Javascript are in abundant demand lately by firms, so having an intensive information of it’s priceless for associate IT skilled.

Expertise in Latest Technologies
To be competitive within the job market, skilled developers should frequently upgrade their skills. 2 of the most recent associated most powerful domains to be a skilled in, are information Science and Mean Stack technology.

Data Science helps firms structure and organize Brobdingnagian volumes of unstructured information. Ancient Business Intelligence tools ar unable to assist analyse giant volumes of such information. It’s calculable that inside a pair of years eightieth of the information collected by organizations are going to be unstructured and can got to be strip-mined victimization data science tools. Information science can facilitate organizations gain substantive insights into the strip-mined information. The goal of information Science is to feature business price to a company. the typical associational beginning earnings for information somebody’s within the U.S. is $120 K whereas in Republic of India an information Scientist could earn an annual package of government agency four hundred,000.
MEAN stack is associate signifier for MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and Node.js all of that ar a group of JavaScript-based technologies wont to develop internet applications and websites. A bonus of MEAN Stack is that each level of associate application is run employing a single language, JavaScript. The convenience of employing a single language on each level of associate application makes JavaScript economical and fashionable within the eyes of gifted internet developers.
Expertise in each these domains are often crucial for a professional’s success.

Knack for Coming up with and Execution of a Project
One of the key skills that firms rummage around for in probable hires is their ability to execute and handle a project. When it comes to an integral part of any company/organization, it becomes of utmost importance that the professionals have an eye fixed towards numerous stages and aspects concerned in it i.e. planning, ideation, management and execution. Thus each skilled should imbibe this ability to be ready to shine on top of the remainder of the ton.

Readiness to Up-skill for Longer Term
The information that the technology business amendment apace is recent hat. Whether or not one has the ability to vary with it or not, ought to be the priority for each skilled.

The advantage enjoyed by several Indian IT firms is beneath threat within the U.S. They need been idlers in adopting digital technologies. Therefore, Indian IT firms have begun to extend their overseas worker count at the expense of native Indian talent.

To outmatch, Indian IT professionals ought to up-skill and learn new technologies like AI, Blockchain, Machine Learning, and therefore the net of Things. For one to sustain within the IT business, operating professionals should become womb-to-tomb students.

Good Communication and Social Skills
Intelligence is very valued in today’s hyper-competitive company atmosphere. Organizations have completed that sensible communication skills are crucial to having the ability to figure seamlessly with shoppers and peers.

Additionally, firms these days need to rent the “leaders of tomorrow”. To do so, high IT firms look on the far side hiring people that have associate experience in an exceedingly specific technology, they appear for people that will work well with alternative professionals and lead a team once needed.
In order to essentially differentiate oneself and outmatch, one should closely endeavor to hone the ability set system inside ourselves.

What to Expect
As technologies grow a lot of subtle, bigger experience are going to be needed on the part of firms to use these technologies and add price. Professionals United Nations agency work on leading edge technology and have the proper skills are going to be in nice demand and shall command higher salaries than those while not the proper skill-set.

Automation: Robots are coming to snatch your jobs

Though a 2013 Oxford study mentioned that almost 50 per cent of all US jobs could be computerised within 20 years, 63 per cent of respondents to a Monster.com survey felt nothing could take away their jobs in the next 50 years or so. This shows that too many people are unaware of the automation wave that is coming soon.

Food service and manufacturing are predicted to be the first job industries which would be taken over by robots and AI for the most part. If some industries get highly automated, the other fields are bound to get affected too. Employees need to re-skill themselves and fast!

“Recently, the Indian banking system has seen the beginning of the revolution. Robots also make burgers and do all kinds of middle tasks, leaving behind only entrepreneurship or a temporary staffing. Artificial intelligence manages investments, handles everything like insurance claims and basic bookkeeping, and performs basic HR tasks,” says Avinash Bharwani, Vice President- New Business, Jetking.

It is your soft skills which will become extremely valuable when AI, automation or robots enter the job market. With the high pace at which new technologies are coming to the fore, we need to ask ourselves whether our work could be done by a robot. And if it can, we need to get worried.

The main jobs which will face a great automation risk include factory workers, drivers, cashiers, waiters and customer service personnel.

Which jobs are safe from automation and robots?
Creative jobs such as those of artists, designers, hairdressers, writers etc are safe as automation cannot replace true creativity Those jobs where humans display their skills such as that of a sportsperson, singer or dancer will be safe as no one would enjoy robots competing against each other or marvel at a completely artificial voice Jobs requiring empathy such as those of counsellors or therapists will be retained by humans. This category could also include to some extent teachers, vets, dentists, fitness trainers, police officers, fire-fighters etc

Jobs where you would need to cater to specific bits of knowledge such as that of tour guides or florists cannot be taken up by robots Jobs which involve creating, maintaining or fixing automation or AI technology would also be safe from robots This shows that while some jobs will be eliminated, many employees will find themselves becoming overseers to AI

Here are a few tips on how you can protect your job from automation and robots:

1. Be aware of how much automation risk you face
Do adequate research in your job field to understand if you should be worried about AI or robots taking over your job. List your skills and check whether any of them could be done by robots. Job skills which deal with people or need you to innovate and come up with new ideas are less likely to be automated. So, focus on enhancing these soft skills to safeguard your job from robots or automation in future.
2. Understand partial automation
It is quite possible that only a part of your job, such as inputting data and info onto spreadsheets, will be automated, which can actually boost your productivity. Often, employees spend a large chunk of their allotted work hours doing menial, routine jobs which do not utilise the human mind adequately. These routine jobs will be dealt with by using automation software, AI and robots. You need to make sure that your top job skills are polished and possess a human touch.
3. Work beyond your job description
To make yourself more valuable to your company, have a decent idea on how the rest of the departments work. Understand the goals of the company and increase your area of expertise so that if your job in under the threat of being taken over by automation, AI or robots, you have other options to bank on.
4. Look for a career move
If per chance you realise that your job will definitely be taken over by robots or automation and there is nothing you can do to change that, start looking for a different job which uses slightly different job skills that cannot be automated. Re-skill yourself accordingly – you can go for short certificate courses or sign up for a free course on Coursera, EdX or yet another MOOC website. Some companies also provide tuition reimbursement to employees looking to skill themselves further.

The automation wave would definitely help push forward human productivity to a great extent and the increasing proliferation of AI and robots is actually a great boon. “Artificial Intelligence is making technology more helpful and intuitive. And this is most evident in the smart-phone market. A phone that can learn your language, count your calories, answer your questions or recognize what a things look like,” says Jetking’s Bharwani.
India and automation

India too needs to join the rest of the world in pushing its way forward in the field of artificial intelligence. “China has progressed in AI-based research; India should also view AI as a critical element of national security strategy. India needs to be prepared for the digitalised future. Establishing AI-ready infrastructure, digital services and digital literacy is thus necessary to prepare India’s jobs and skills markets for an AI-based future. The bold urban initiative by government called ‘Smart Cities’ is also giving a hint to the public to stay ready,” says Bharwani.

The skills, experience and insight that a human being can provide are irreplaceable. Soft skills are the skills of the future. Machines and robots would only be taking over those jobs which are suitable for them.

As Bharwani says, “I believe the time is not far when the robots takeover workplaces and hence it is necessary to know how humans are required to handle them. AI is no more a toddler. Many AI researchers believe that the day will ultimately come. The question is, are humans ready for it?”

Why B-School is initiating teaching Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

There is no doubt that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are the two hot buzzwords right now. Examples of how AI and ML based disruptive practices are replacing traditional businesses on one hand while creating new business opportunities, on the other hand, are many.
In a nutshell, AI is the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks in a ‘smart’ way while ML prescribes the set of such ‘smart’ rules that the computer figures itself out.

2 lakh new jobs coming up in Artificial Intelligence sector
It is no exaggeration to say the current and the future belongs to AI and ML. It is estimated that in USA, there are more than 10,000 positions available at top employers across the country and additionally, the country is estimated to have 2, 50,000 open data science jobs by 2024.

Elsewhere — in EU, Canada and China — the demand for AI related jobs are not only in high demand, they are a few notches above the median salary.

India too is not far behind other countries in terms of AI hiring. Some estimates expect a 60 per cent rise by this year due to increasing adoption of automation, and the related IT industry will require 50 per cent more workforces equipped with digital skills.

All this translates to around 2 lakh new jobs this year.

Educational institutes need to provide future AI employees
Obviously, where the demand is there, educational institutes are expected to be at the forefront in bridging the gap. The question is — why are AI and ML finding its way into the B-school curriculum when it appears that AI and ML are still the forte of computer scientists, programmers and mathematicians?

Almost all of the top 20 business schools in India are now offering specialisations in Business Analytics while some of them are offering specialisation tracks in AI ML.

The answer is evident if we closely inspect two things:
One – what does AI ML typically do or can do?
Two — what are the expected roles of business schools?

Decision-making based on data inputs isn’t anything new: Benefits of AI and ML
To understand what AI and ML bring, we must acknowledge that decision-making based on data inputs isn’t new. Indeed, the traditional courses offered in B-schools related to decision sciences used computational algorithms as well as statistical models to solve problems.

Most of these algorithms are over a century old. However, our getting to a solution was limited by the way we deemed fit to go about it.

For example, logistic regressions, the favourite technique for many to solve binary classification problems (problems that needed us to correctly predict one group from the other), required us not only to identify the factors but also how they must be related to each other.

Undiscovered and hidden patterns in the data eluded us. ML solved this by letting the algorithms learn on its own, from the data and from itself the best route to classify.
Thus, the various boosting models, ensemble techniques as well as neural network models connected dots in the data which improved upon the results traditional algorithms could not.

The second finesse AI and ML brought are the unstructured data. This is what defines them and has not only gives us additional insights, it helps us address and tackle issues which otherwise we struggled with.
We now solve traditional problems using data obtained from video cameras, speeches, texts, social media interactions, images, satellite images etc. We no longer need to only focus on historical data to gauge stock market sentiments, often analysing texts in shareholder reports gives us better accuracy.
To estimate the footfalls in shopping malls, traditional survey methods are getting replaced by images of cars in car parks, to design agricultural forward contracts, satellite images of agricultural plots provide invaluable information.

Simply put, AI and ML have allowed us to access, process and utilize data in an efficient way to solve complex problems – both traditional as well as those posed in the new ecosystem. This is where B-schools fit in, almost by design.

B-school curriculums have always pride themselves for creating efficient decision makers. Managers are expected to decide and then execute their decisions. Often, such decisions must be made based on limited data and experience and yet must be made quickly.

It is not surprising, therefore, that some of those decisions face ex-post criticism, and perhaps rightly so. Decisions based on AI-ML are likely to reduce such errors.
For one, most of the unstructured data are not open to manipulations, and two, analysis based on that data reduces the human bias largely.

What is missing with AI and ML: the power of human intuition
However, there is an intrinsic part of human decision making that can’t be separated — intuition.
To a machine, a data is a set of numbers arranged in rows and columns where the column headings have no meaning! To a manager, the column headings are the most important. It is his training and experience that allows him to retain what is essential and cull out the rest.
Unlike a data scientist, whose journey with ML techniques is almost entirely about the column headings, he can trade-off accuracy for insight.

For example, an ML technique may always pick up ethnicity of an individual to determine whether he is worthy of receiving a loan, but a manager can use insights to exclude ethnicity as it may violate some fundamental principles!

A successful AI ML programme in B-schools must ensure that this balance stays. Curriculums must focus on ML techniques complimenting the managerial decision and not substitute them.
While Indian business schools were reasonably slow in riding the business analytics wave, it appears they want to remain ahead of the AI ML curve this time.

AI to enhance new job and employment engagement

Contrary to popular belief, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have a “positive impact” on workplaces as it would create new job roles besides enhancing employee engagement and decision-making, a report said on September 6.
Artificial Intelligence to diversify human thinking
According to a Tata Communications’ study based on inputs from 120 global business leaders, Artificial Intelligence will diversify human thinking rather than replace it.

Artificial Intelligent: Statistics
As per the study, 90 per cent leaders agree that cognitive diversity is important for management

75 per cent respondents expect AI to create new roles for their employees
93 per cent believe that AI will enhance decision-making
AI to help people become more productive
“While AI will replace some tasks, it will also create new ways of working, new jobs and new roles in companies. AI will also help people as well as organisations become more productive. It’s not man vs machine, rather man and machine working together,” Tata Communications CEO and MD Vinod Kumar told PTI.

The report further noted that Artificial Intelligence has the potential to assess each employee’s skills and innovation priorities, and suggest activities to spark creative thinking throughout the organisational hierarchy.
This can democratise the creative process and increase engagement of all workers.

More focus on communication and innovation
AI will also free employees from most tedious repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus more on communication and innovation.
“Work will move from being task-based to strategic, enabling workers to enhance their curiosity and creative thinking,” it added.
According to Professor Ken Goldberg, a leading AI researcher at UC Berkeley, there is fear now that AI will surpass human thinking and that machines are superior to humans.

“Robots and AI are not going to take away this creative, insightful, empathetic aspect of almost every job,” Goldberg noted.

The Promise of AI is in Assistive Intelligence

This is a contributed piece by Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer at Tableau Software and has been written in response to a recent piece by our senior staff writer, Dan Swinhoe

As artificial intelligence surges to the forefront of modern society, research and debate swirls around the power and role it should play. More often than not, a cloud of skepticism looms over the topic of security of jobs in the workforce. However, if we consider AI as assistive intelligence rather than an asteroid on a collision course, humans can take advantage of the opportunities presented through its advancement. With this approach, humans enhance, rather than replace skills, leading to increased benefit from technology and improvements in quality of life.
Applications of AI have the ability to empower workers and increase efficiencies across industries and every aspect of the supply chain. To put this into perspective, a recent study from PwC argues that machines will “increase productivity by up to 14.3% by 2030” and the UK’s GDP could be up to 10.3% higher in 2030, equivalent to an additional £232bn ($307bn).

Yet the advantages of AI are not exclusive to a macroeconomic level. Benefits also extend to the individual level by fundamentally changing employee responsibilities. Workers are liberated from daily mundane and menial tasks to explore a higher level of thinking and creativity, ultimately expanding their job roles. Of course, this in turn will translate into positives for their employers as a more engaged workforce leads to increased sales, productivity and employee retention.

In fact, a recent Deloitte Insights study of workers in the public sector showed that many tasks could actually be handled through automation. The study found that documenting and recording information is the most time-consuming for employees, sucking 10% of work hours, which could be saved using technology like AI.

However, AI is not a replacement for tasks simply because they are time-consuming. The same Deloitte study concludes that tasks, like caring for patients, simply cannot be replaced by AI. For example, cognitive technologies cannot assess a patient’s mood or administer medicine, and therefore are not advanced enough to replace the role of workers carrying out such responsibilities. Currently, the reach of AI extends only to enabling human workers with more of the time and resources needed to provide exceptional patient care. Ultimately, AI compliments human intelligence, enabling workers to focus on tasks that require insights and experience beyond what goes into an algorithm.

This brings us to the fact that true business value comes from the capitalisation of uniquely human skills. Individuals fluent in the language of data are already in high demand across the corporate world. While machine learning backed algorithms and AI assist decision makers in accessing and analysing relevant data, some tasks are abstract or situational and require an amount of intuition and experience to make the best decisions. Humans are uniquely qualified to ensure the encoded assumptions are reasonable and then to ask meaningful follow-up questions that link answers back to business problems.

While AI can find unexpected outliers and identify patterns within the data, human analysis plays a vital role in gathering useful insights from what they find on the screen. This is especially true when those problems lie in industries such as marketing, where success is often related to one’s ability to make a personal connection between brands and consumers – human to human. AI can be used to sort through data and identify a target audience, but only humans have the emotional intelligence to create a story that will resonate with the right audiences and deliver results.

Just as any mammal adapts to a change in its environment, so too will the human race. Machines have yet to match humans in regards to solving contextual business problems with big data. They lack the ability to draw from personal experience, context, emotion and the ingenuity required to go that next step. Exploring this scope is therefore paramount in acquiring job security and increasing workers’ purpose.

The debate surrounding AI will only intensify with its continued expansion. As with any groundbreaking development, the fear of disrupting the status quo is unavoidable. However, disruption does not have to equal destruction.
What matters is how we respond and find new ways to thrive alongside technology.

Property Investment Market Continuing to Hit New Heights in Hong Kong

According to a report by JLL’s latest Property Market Monitor, the property investment market in Hong is continuously hitting new heights since last year, which is also riding on strong global investor interest.

A total of four en-bloc office buildings were sold for a total consideration of HKD 14.8 billion in 2018, which is about 17% higher than last year.

The en-bloc sale of 18 King Wah Road drew the most attention, setting a new record for the largest office transaction in Hong Kong East.

Decentralization remained as a key theme playing out among office tenants in the leasing market. The spotlight and the focus of leasing activity was on Hong Kong East and Kowloon East. Here tenant decentralization and consolidation requirements underpinned demand. Net take-up in the overall market amounted to 209,900 sq. ft till date. The net absorption in Central reached 33,000 sq. ft. as diverse tenants requested room for expansion.

“The broadening gap between rents in Central and emerging core business districts will add momentum to decentralization. We expect Hong Kong’s Grade A office market rentals to continue to trend higher, rising by up to 5% in 2018, with the support of the outbound growth of Mainland Chinese companies. Central will continue to outperform the overall market as demand competes for the pockets of space that exist,” reports Alex Barnes, Head of Markets at JLL.

On the back of a tightened vacancy environment, office rents in Central advanced by 0.7% m-o-m in January. There was a rise in rents in Hong Kong East region by 0.8% m-o-m, driven largely by increasing demand at the top-end of the market.

“The strong pricing achieved in the government sale of the Murray Road Car Park in May last year is now starting to permeate through the broader office market as investors reset benchmarks. With local money also flowing into the market, the record high prices being set in the market are no longer relying solely on PRC buyers. We expect capital values to rise a further 5-10% in 2018 even with interest rates set to rise further,” asserted Denis Ma, Head of Research at JLL.

The sentiment remained upbeat buttressed by record high land sale for government sites in Kowloon as well as strong gains in the local stock market, in the city’s residential market. The mass residential properties’ capital values raised up by 0.9% m-o-m in the first month of 2018 following to an increase of 1.3% m-o-m the previous month.

Next Generation CIOs to Create Paths of Success

This is a contributed piece by Adam Spearing, Senior Vice President, EMEA of Platform and Communities at Salesforce

The role of the CIO has changed immeasurably since I started working in tech some 20 years ago. The IT department is no longer here to ‘keep the lights on.’ Instead, the CIO is now Innovator in Chief, disruptor extraordinaire, and driver of change.

This shift is down to the rapid change in the way tech is perceived in many organizations and the demands from a generation used to the mobile consumer experience — it has become a core enabler to the business, rather than a nice to have. What’s more, with breakthrough capabilities enabled by new technologies such as AI and big data, a growing shortage of available developers, and an increasingly tech-savvy business user, the role of IT — and the CIO in particular — is morphing into one of strategic advisor to the business and driver of innovation within the company.

But how can IT leaders manage this digital transition and take advantage of rapidly emerging opportunities? Discussing this question with customers, colleagues, and partners, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three things IT leaders need to do to thrive in this new environment.

Take a business-first IT mindset
The rise of the next-gen CIO and their success can be put down to a number of factors, but one of the biggest is ensuring the IT function is commercially oriented. Today’s most successful CIOs are setting up their departments as profit, rather than cost, centers. CIOs must have a greater understanding of the business case for any new programme or tech-focused initiative. Only by understanding the wider business strategy and objectives can CIOs understand how to prioritize IT projects that best serve the customer and grow the business. It’s therefore a key part of the CIO’s role to ensure IT is involved in all decision-making processes and to establish themselves as a partner within the business.

Ocado’s CTO Paul Clarke is a case in point. When it comes to instilling long-term change, Paul sees the mission for his division, Ocado Technology, as fueling innovation and entrepreneurial spirit throughout the business. This ensures that technology decisions and initiatives are powering the commercial and strategic needs of the company.

Unlock data to innovate
Technological change is also forcing large companies to find new ways of working. Shell, for example, is facing market disruption from new types of competitors, which are changing the way the market trades and buys fuel. The company can’t afford to stand still and watch the world change around it.
As a CIO, one way to discover new ways of working is to unlock the data sitting within the business and turn that ever-growing pile of data into opportunity. Embracing a cloud-based system of engagement is no longer just about delivering a 360-degree view of the customer. It also enables end users to slice and dice customer data for actionable insights that help them see opportunities for new ways of working such as building apps to help run the business.

In the case of Shell, the team is using data analytics, big data and artificial intelligence to make better decisions internally. For example AI is being used in the analysis of the huge volumes of information created in the day-to-day running of Shell’s plants, helping the company to become more profitable.
Shell also uses AI to improve the customer experience and to keep ahead of the competition. For example the Shell Connected Car Open API can analyze user behavior and offer customers tailored convenience and loyalty rewards. The platform helps Shell predict what a customer might want so that when they arrive at one of their retail sites they can immediately send an offer to their phone such as a discount on food and drink.

Focus on the customer and employee experience
It’s not just businesses looking for fresh ways of working. Customers too are looking for innovative ways to make their lives easier. Our recent State of IT report shows customers are not simply looking for differentiation — they seek disruption. And they’re giving their loyalty (and business) to companies that are looking at new ways to do things that make their lives easier – whether it’s booking a place to stay with Airbnb or ordering tonight’s dinner via Deliveroo.

Technology has also changed what customers expect from the brands and companies they interact with. An overwhelming 70% said technology has made it easier for them to take their business elsewhere and a further 58% agree it has ‘significantly changed’ their expectations of how companies should interact with them. CIOs therefore need to focus on deploying new workflows and technologies that help their business deliver a convenient — and disruptive — experience to customers.

CIOs today should also look at applying these same principles to their employees. After all, it is employees who serve on the front lines of customer service, act as brand ambassadors, and are ultimately responsible for the organization’s success.

It’s clear that it has never been a more exciting or daunting time to be a CIO. The reason? Well, with IT leading the business, CIOs are under the spotlight like never before. At the same time the speed of business is also increasing. To quote Shell’s VP & Global CIO, Craig Walker: “Make a decision in the 1990s and it wouldn’t be wrong for eight years. Now, it could be eight weeks.”