COVID 19 accelerated all transformation processes at the corporate level and today every company that wants to succeed must transform and improve its digital environment and core.

Marco Iansiti and JKarim Lakhani, professors at Harvard Business School, discuss how the pandemic has generated great opportunities for the birth or evaluation of this new type of companies.

Marco Iansiti: Okay, who is going to initiate this?

Karim R. Lakhani: You get it going.

Marco Iansiti: The AI era, it’s really defined by the emergence of a different kind of enterprise. Which is a big deal, because that doesn’t happen in business very often. Traditionally, we’ve built companies around individual units in silos. You have one silo around marketing, another around product development, and another around manufacturing.

Silos are necessary to optimize people’s work. But as the enterprise begins to incorporate digital technology, gradually, that enterprise will need to be built differently.

Modern organizations are really built around a data-centric architecture, which integrates data different parts of the way they can. Then efficiently implement technology based on that data to drive as many different processes as possible.

Karim R. Lakhani: Can I add something here?

Marco Iansiti: Yes, yes.

Karim R. Lakhani: : What I can say is the era of AI, it’s not something far away that will happen in the future. It is happening now. It is happening to us today.

Even right now, if you are looking at us on a website, you are looking at us on your cell phone. This has been enabled by companies that are directly innovating in the AI era.

The challenge for the rest of us is how do we adapt? How do we change? So that we can also be competitive with both the giants and the start-ups that are trying to make a difference.

We thought we had time. We thought many industries had time to make the adjustment. Of course it’s now, that’s no longer an option.

Marco Iansiti: Then the COVID pandemic pretty much changed everything. Suddenly, all companies had to deal with this.

Overnight, by survival, all these restaurants went digital. They started working with Uber and every possible delivery driver to make the delivery of their products happen. The whole restaurant experience, overnight, went digital.

Marco Iansiti: You know what, Karim? QR codes are everywhere in the United States.

Karim R. Lakhani: Exactly.

Marco Iansiti: Because nobody wants to go to restaurants. If you want to go and find out what the menu is, you grab the QR code on the door and you get to the website.

Karim R. Lakhani: I was so amazed at the speed. I think it was survival. It’s a survival instinct. This, for us, is the big accelerator.

Marco Iansiti: Look, it’s very simple. If you walk down the street and you see your local Chinese restaurant just using QR codes to point to their menu, a multi-billion dollar company should be able to do that too.

People Transformed. Literally overnight.

So they integrated their data and went through this big data lake.

Essentially, this infrastructure that would allow them to very quickly create predictive models around how many ventilators they might need, how many NA5 masks they need or might need. All of that had to be predicted.

Karim R. Lakhani: This requires a degree of centralization around the data.

You can’t have the cardiology unit with data outside of the nephrology unit and away from the emergency department.

You don’t just want all the data, you want to be able to see all of this and then make predictions about where capacity is needed. Where are patients expected to go through?

And providing this enterprise-wide view across the enterprise, like data integration, analytics and software, are already at the core is the big change.

Marco Iansiti: It’s almost as if the pandemic was an accelerator really, of things that people had wanted to do before and required the deployment of certain systems that, on the fly, were redesigning how the organization actually worked.

Karim R. Lakhani: Another really cool example that we’ve presented in the book, is a company called Moderna.

The big aha! for CEO Stéphane Bancel, around artificial intelligence and digitization, had come into one of their scientist’s offices.

Basically, the scientist was doing a complicated series of calculations, moving genes around. He had five screens around him and he was basically copying and pasting things from Excel in one cell to the other cell.

That he saw as a nightmare, because in the biotech world, it’s a copy-and-paste mistake, and that can mean going back six or nine months, if something by accident got overlapped or because of some careless mistakes.

They all had to be digitized and put together.

This transformation really helps with the COVID pandemic as well, because they were able, in 42 days, once they sequenced the virus, to then be able to submit to the FDA, a vaccine application.

They’re still a startup with 1200 employees, right? Competing with trying to create a vaccine with large organizations in the pharmaceutical world.

If you think about the scale of what they have they’ve been able to achieve the differences in the processes that you can implement change if you have digital data and analytics at the core of your operation.