WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

A lot has changed in the last ten years, and even more will change in the next ten. Are you ready?

Firstly, a big thank you to Kathrin and the team for inviting me to be the keynote at this years RWE Leadership meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany to present on “Life in 2030” to over 300 of RWE’s leadership team, including their CEO Martin Schmitz, and host the dozen or so open innovation workshops where we discussed what the changes we see today and on the horizon will mean for the energy sector, the company and their future strategy.

During the keynote I shone a light on the underlying trends accelerating the pace of change and disruption at a global scale, which today is fast, but that will be even faster tomorrow, and which are helping revolutionise every industry in the world, from entertainment and retail, to energy and transportation, and beyond. I also discussed the often hidden impacts these trends are having on industry at large, such as the decentralisation and democratisation of services, and how, when combined, they can change the economics of an entire industry within a relatively short timeframe.

Watch the keynote

I broke the keynote essentially into four parts – the future of life from a personal, professional and domestic perspective, and then the way in which all industries, not just the energy sector, are being transformed and up ended.

While you can watch the video for yourself, from a personal perspective technology is not just democratising access to information, it’s also democratising access to creativity and expertise in the form of new Creative Machine and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based services, such as Robo-Doctors, Robo-Innovators, and Robo-Lawyers to name but three. But as technology becomes more pervasive within society there will also be a privacy cost, so I discussed the nascent rise of new Self-Soverign Identity programs, like those from IBM and the Sovrin Foundation, whose objectives are, in short, to help us reclaim reclaim control of our information and our online identities from the large platforms we all use today.

Moving across then into the professional world where we’re seeing AI increasingly take on and take over more cognitive roles, across a variety of industries, and the gradual rise of fully distributed autonomous organisations, I discussed how organisations and governments can tackle the challenges these present head on. And then crossing over to the home I touched on Connected Home, behavioural computing, and the rise of urban farming and the reality of an increasingly decentralised energy generation and supply system, based on renewable energy technologies, that’s helping push the cost of electricity at the point of consumption to zero.

All of which was just for starters, so if you’d like to know more about Life in 2030 then grab a coffee, and hit the play button above. I hope you enjoy the experience, and maybe next time I’ll see you at one of the events…