A sought-after keynote speaker and industry thought leader, Peter Sondergaard* gave a notable presentation at the TNT Symposium' first edition in front of an audience of 400 tech decision-makers. Throughout this week, we propose you to relive - or discover - the best moments of Peter Sondergaard's inspirational speech.

Post-Pandemic Digitalization: An Explosion in Change

Part 2: What happens when we have...

"We tend to focus on all the things that are new", said Peter Sondergaard. "But we all know that the new isn't necessarily the core disruption. It is often the known and tried, that is implemented at scale, that will change how we operate. I believe that there are five major trends at scale that will massively shift how we think of ourselves as humans and what we do. Now, none of these are any surprise to you, but some of them are not necessarily implemented yet."

"It is clear that if you were in an experiment of dreams, or thoughts, or even long range strategic planning, you could imagine a world in which artificial intelligence, machine learning and the associated required data are available to the edge of the environment that you operate in. And when I say the edge of the environment, I mean your entire ecosystem, not just little pet projects decided by the CIO at the centre or some business unit leader", he told the audience.

"Imagine a world in which cloud is not necessarily just something that we are rapidly deploying", suggested Peter Sondergaard, "but that is available everywhere, that is the compute infrastructure that we operate on".

"Imagine a world in which we have powerful terabyte communication structures to our cup, to our watch, to the shoe we are wearing. What happens then?", he asked.

"imagine that we completely reverse the architecture upon which we, the last 50 years, have built our infrastructure, namely replace things with a quantum based architecture that will not be only a pet project of some large scale university or some big pharmaceutical organization, but will be available and used by all of you", he said.

"And then fifth and last, imagine a world in which we don't have any development problems because everybody is a developer, everybody creates software code in the world we actually operate in", he added.

"These are not necessarily revolutionary", noted Gartner's former VP. "The linear extrapolation of one of these is not necessarily something we couldn't imagine. It is in the intersection of these five trends that we can imagine a world where three simple things may constitute the way of aggregating everything that we talked about with regards to technology. Three very, very simple things: the products and services that we have, the organizational structures that we operate, and us as human beings." 

"The first direction that this will enable us to go is obviously a world in which we are embedded in, we are part of, that is to say autonomous and sustainable products and services. This is a world that is built on a digital twin of everything physical that human beings have. It is a world that is constructed around a circular environment, reusing all of the resources of which we have very little left on earth, and obviously dominated by robots everywhere", he explained.

"The second part is a world that is dominated by automated composable processes", he said. "In essence, this means that we digitally produce our organization, and then it can exist without human beings. It is a world in which we are integrated and think of ourselves not as part of a corporate organizational structure, but as a fully automated composable process of ecosystems".

"And then last, and possibly the most fascinating, is the world of digital humans", he declared. "A world in which we likely may see us as an NFT, a non-fungible token, similarly to how organizations, products and services appear as digital twins". According to Peter Sondergaard's vision, this world is "a world that is dominated by numerous virtual environments, many virtual products, and various ways of interacting".

(to be continued)

Michael Renotte

*Peter Sondergaard was executive vice president and member of Gartner’s operating committee for 15 years. He founded The Sondergaard Group and now runs his own Executive Advisory business. Additionally he is chairman of the board for 2012.ai, an artificial intelligence platform company, DI2X, a digital leadership development and research institute, and DecideAct, a cloud-based strategy execution management and governance platform.