First of all, let me introduce the speakers in the seminar.
Reef Alawwad, 7 years experience as a business strategy manager at Accenture strategy. Reef graduated from Carleton University at Canada.
Jack Molony, senior consultant at new independent payment services company. Jack is working in the industry for a long time, he was the Head of IT Banking Systems in AIB bank at Dublin, 1999. In 2013 Jack was a senior IT consultant in Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority – SAMA. He really has a wide knowledge about technology and he was capable to identify the Saudi market needs.
4th industrial revolution is the revolution that we are living in nowadays.
It means that the economy is driven by technology and digitization and that generate a lot of new invention, and it is an opportunity for new innovation.
Most businesses models or even government is going digital worldwide.
2030 Saudi Vision is the closest example, government services, government papers, passports, National ID’s, rating the ministry services @WataniAPP , communicating with official offices, even your hospital file and reports, they will all be digital.
It not only the process of transferring offline activities to online, but it is also more about data collection and data analysis so the government can be close to the citizens and companies can be closer to customers, and understand them more. Some of the technology developed countries such as Singapore was doing a digital transpiration earlier and that gave them kind of “ competitive advantage”.
(Accenture, 2014)
Data could be collected by the digital channels that governments or even private companies are using. Then they will analyze the data to understand the depth behavior of the consumers. One of the concerns for data collection and analysis is the ethicality aspect of it, is collecting data is ethical? and answering this question from the guest speaker was hard because each situation has a different answer.
Moving forward in the 4th revolution, Mr.Molony was mainly discussing the most important technologies,
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Augmented reality (AR)
Is 3-D virtual objects are integrated into a 3-D real environment in real time. (Azuma, 2006) This technology has many applications such as medical, manufacturing and repair, entertainment, and military aircraft. And the most common application for AR is shopping, by 2020, 250 million people will shop by AR.
IKEA could be a great example for a company that used AR in a very smart way and it was improving customer shopping experience, IKEA app is fitting the furniture in your home space, so you can see if it fits or no by AR.
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Artificial intelligence (AI)
AI is basically when machines have enough intelligence to act and work like a human. There is much application for AI, but the most important applications are health care, automotive, military, and video games.
Paypal, for example, developed their security protection by developing an AI system for it, so when suspecting and harmful actions the computers will react to it.
In another hand, even though Walmart is founded in 1962, but they are following the technology and trying to develop.
Lauren Desegur, VP of customer experience engineering at WalmartLabs said, “We’re 
essentially creating a bridge where we are enhancing the shopping experience through machine learning. We want to make sure there is a seamless experience between what customers do online and what they do in our stores.”
Google assistant can be the closest and simplest representative technology of AI, the assistant is developed with deep learning that it can speak and understand as good as a human.
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Digital disruption of infrastructure
The main technology that falls under Digital disruption of infrastructure is Drones, it is making a huge change in the industry. It has multiple uses, photography is one of the simplest things that a drone can do, spying could be the most complicated and skilled roll for the drone.
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Cryptocurrency
it is exactly the digital banking industry, it can go from assets to money, and it also has all the service that people can do such as a financial transaction. Bitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency worldwide, not all banks or countries acknowledge cryptocurrency due to the risk it has.
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Advanced analytics
Big data is a new science that all the world is focusing on, even the government is investing in advanced analytics because it can indicate a lot of things more deeper than people imagine. According to the documentary “Terms and condition may apply” by Netflix, in 2001 and after the crisis that happened in the US, the government was allocating a new rule that called “Patriot” and this law is basically about saving and tracking all digital communication possible from all aspects to avoid any possible terrorists attack. Since the American government can not determine the terrorist’s channels or even their devices, so that means they are tracking all information possible in the country or even the world. And that was not only for security reasons but also now the US government have a huge advanced data analytics that can help to understand citizens behavior or even taxes payment. Nowadays, advanced analytics can analyze the health rate, educational rate, and growth rate for the countries.
Not only that but also private companies are making an advance of the data analytics too. We might think that Google is a free service, but actually, it is not. While you are using google for free, you are giving them your information, history, every word you googled, every email you write, is worth more than that. According to the documentary, your data worth 500$ monthly.
Companies such as Google, or even Facebook is having a huge database and data analytics and they are making millions out of it because of adds, or even exchange this personal information.
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Robotics & machine learning
Robots industry is very developed industry, robots nowadays can coke, talk, or even travel! But mainly, robots have functions, rolls, and tasks to do.
Some of them used in the military and others in homes.
Meet Sofia (the robot) is the first Saudi robot citizen (FII, 2017)
Also, the last two technologies are Edge technology and Material sciences & battery technology.
In addition, I believe that such technology is making people life easier. But my biggest fear is the ethicality of it. As a marketer, I think this is an opportunity to learn more to apply technology to work.
It was very insightful to know about the revolution that we are leaving in depth so we can understand what we will be going to face in the future.
I learned that data is a huge science that marketers should learn to understand customers needs and wants…….. if they didn’t invent a marketer robot.
The trainee that will turn to CEO 