From brain drain to brain gain – expats returning home due to COVID boost local economies

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Expats forced home in the wake of COVID are helping build the cross-border networks needed for global innovation, according to futurist Ross Dawson.

They’re the elite of Silicon Valley but they don’t live in Palo Alto. They’re expats at home for the first time in years, looking for new opportunities. Their employers no longer care where they work.

These are the digital nomads of COVID. People who can choose to work anywhere they want, and who are driving a reverse brain drain unlike anything seen before.
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How the integrated enterprise shifts us from Big Data to Small and Wide Data

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In perusing Gartner’s Top 10 Data and Analytics Trends for 2021 it struck me that the most important meta-theme was integration.

The last decades of enterprise technology could be viewed as shifting from monolithic – and in large organizations almost inevitably siloed – computing to richly integrated platforms, though that journey is far from complete in most companies.
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2021: A year of excitement and positive change

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2020 will go down in history, not just as a year of pandemic, but also one of transformation.

As we push into 2021, we need to consider our mindset for the year.

Many people I speak to are excited about the coming year.
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Shifting to work structures that will serve us far better

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Cisco recently compiled a thought leadership article Employees choose hybrid: A look into the workforce of the future.
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2021+ 9 themes for next year and beyond

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The end of each year is always a good time to distil predictions for what is coming. 2020 has been an absolutely pivotal year, it is a critical time for us to actively make sense of our path forward.

In the slides below I have laid out 9 themes that I believe will be at the center of our world in 2021 and beyond.
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Responsible AI: selecting degrees of transparency and highlighting potential for bias

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As the power of AI soars, the ethics of how we use AI is becoming an increasingly pressing issue, which as a futurist I speak about frequently.

In working with the intelligent automation company Pega I have learned about some of their extremely interesting approaches to ‘Responsible AI’.
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Looking forward to 2100 on offices, robotics, education, social media, urbanization…

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A recent article in ICON magazine looks at what to expect as we think far into the future, potentially the end of this century, based primarily on an interview with me.

The full article is well worth a read. Below are some excerpts from my quotes in the piece.
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How can large organizations build empathy at scale?

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This year in particular has been one in which many people have needed empathy in trying circumstances.

Yet how can large organizations with thousands or even millions of customers express real empathy?
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deepmind protein folding

An evolutionary leap for life sciences: when AI transcends human crowds

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The announcement that Google’s DeepMind has won the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction challenge is important in a number of ways.

Being able to predict a protein’s shape from its amino acid sequence could massively accelerate the development of new medicines. Speaking to Nature:
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customer service journey

Weaving together microjourneys to create compelling customer service journeys

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The phrase “customer journey” has become part of everyday business vernacular, bringing a customer-centered and design thinking perspective to the mainstream.

Customer engagement and intelligent automation company Pega uses the phrase “microjourney” to focus on the elements that comprise the customer journey. This is useful both in being able to design a better experience for customers, but also in optimizing each of those elements so they can be woven together effectively across situations existing and new.
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