One question no consultant ever seems to be asked--and is hard pressed to answer, is “of the many new technologies we might deploy, which do you think will create the most value for us, comparing all the available tools we might use?”
For starters, there is no quantitatively proven way to evaluate a large range of important new technologies and predict their ability to drive business outcomes, in a zero-sum manner.
But in a non-scientific sense, all the hype right now is related to artificial intelligence. So if one were to evaluate potential value by the amount of hype, one might suggest something like this:
AI might easily be viewed as widely and immediately applicable for purposes of transformative automating tasks, improving decision-making, and creating new products and services. The business value arguably should show up in lower operating costs and higher revenue, for almost any firm or industry that learns to apply it.
But most observers likely would agree that most firms can use AI, and apply it fairly quickly. Only some firms can take advantage of 5G, edge computing, network slicing or private networks, and it will take more time to reap the benefits.
Nearly any firm can use generative AI to enhance marketing, customer service, technical support or customer-facing communications. Only some firms benefit from factory automation or smart agriculture.
On the cost front, AI can be used to automate customer service tasks, identify fraud, and optimize supply chains, reduce the amount of manual labor employees must conduct and speed decision-making by generating inferences about basic business trends.
In a similar way, Generative AI can be used to create new marketing materials, develop new products, and generate personalized content for customers, as well as improve chat and other forms of customer service.
5G’s value might be its ability to support remote sensors and appliances and the data those devices can supply for managing business processes, at lower costs than other networks have been able to offer, or with greater security.
Edge computing’s value might be quality of experience benefits in areas ranging from content delivery to process control. In some cases there might be savings in network connectivity costs.
Private networks might offer higher security, lower latency and therefore faster response times for time-sensitive use cases.
Again, that is a look at “hype.” Right now, AI and generative AI are grabbing all the oxygen in the room. Various observers will likely differ on how each of the categories should really be ranked, in terms of potential value creation. Some will argue private networks are more important, 5G overrated, for example.
But that is beside the point. At the moment, attention is riveted on AI.
