New technologies to generate insights without exposing the underlying data is ushering in a new era for value creation in the digital economy. From mapping the genome to reducing the carbon footprint, how can business leaders unlock value from data collaboration at scale? Discussing the topic at the World Economic Forum 2023 were the panelists: Frances D’Souza, CEO of Illumina, Laura Alber, CEO of Williams Sonoma, Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Christian Klein, CEO of SAP.
Big Data Future Is Here
Antonio Neri said, “The digital transformation of the core is basically making the enterprise and the society way more efficient and more inclusive. But when you think about that, we live in a digital economy. We are creating an enormous amount of data. I think the decade of the 2010 to the 2020 has been a decade of the information area. Through that journey, through that transformation, we created an enormous amount of data. I think if you think about the extrapolation of the data and other challenges with sustainability, think about a carbon footprint. I think about carbon footprint to host this data, but the data can be also used to solve the carbon footprint. So in many ways, I think we enter in the 2020 what I call the new age of insights where with the tools that have emerged with supercomputing, AI, machine learning, we have an ability to actually use that data to solve some of the biggest societal problems.”
Talking about the issues that could be solved with data, he said, “Climate being one, obviously, energy transition being another one, healthcare, transportation. So there is a lot of societal problems we can tackle now with the tools we never had before. And as I think about the hyper-connected world, we have an opportunity also to make the world more inclusive and so that people can participate. So this is the opportunity to really act fast, and there is many, many use cases we can go and discuss today.”
Data In Healthcare
Implementing data sharing in healthcare is advantageous. Frances D’Souza said, “We’re entering this golden era where biology is going through its own digital transformation. We have more and more tools that digitize aspects of biology. So at Illumina, for example, we make the machines that do genomic sequencing. So you put in blood or saliva or plant material, and we’ll tell you the DNA or the RNA in that sample. And there are a whole set of use cases after you digitize the data. Once you digitize biology, you can solve profound biological problems.”
Explaining how data helps in Cancer detection, he continued, “So we ran some of the largest studies ever run in cancer, over 300,000 samples across different studies, and ran three experiments. The first experiment was we were looking for known cancer mutations, you know, BRCA, KRAS, EGFR in the blood samples. Second one was we looked for distortions in the genome, heavily mutations, wrong number of chromosomes. But the third experiment was unbiased, where machines and AI tell what the biomarkers were for Cancer. And the machines beat the world’s best by orders of magnitude. The machines identify these methylation signatures, these very complicated methylation signatures in the blood, that tell you you have cancer right now.”
Data And Supply Chains
Talking about resilient supply chains, Christian Klein said, “We at SAP, of course, we also ask ourselves what can our technology do about all the challenges we are discussing here at the WEF. The last decade, we spent a lot about creating big data lakes and working on predictive analytics. And look how great some industries really developed and what we can do in the healthcare industry. But now talking about supply chains. Let’s collaborate and share data. When Antonio and we are sharing data, I know exactly can he really deliver the hardware I need to run my cloud business? If he cannot deliver, I have a big problem. Now, let’s assume we are bringing his suppliers also to the same platform. And now we are all sharing data down to the raw material. And suddenly I see what is happening across the supply chain. And this is about data collaboration. And this is where we are building a huge network where we are connecting, for example, the automotive industry from a Volkswagen, from a Toyota, from General Motors, down to the raw material. And suddenly you see how is the demand changing and what supply is needed.”
He continued, “And are there disruptions in the supply chain? To really react much faster to some of the disruptions we have seen in the last two years. And now once more, one more, when we talk about sustainability. Once you have this end to end transparency and you are going to share material data, why not use the standard with the big four and put a standard in for ESG, for carbon? And now suddenly we talk all about the same carbon data. We really put a standard in place. And again, we are sharing data and suddenly we also have data from scope three. And suddenly an enterprise can take real action, conscious decisions on not how to only create resilient supply chains, but also sustainable supply chains. And this is where technology can help, where we can build bridges.”