Future of Services is Live!
Revolutionizing services necessitates transforming people, too.
The services industry comprises siloed businesses (large and small) that never talk to one another — with a customer managing their “life” across many of them. Today, people have to maintain their lifestyle across many heterogeneous services with various inconsistent communication and management tools. Today, customers call and check emails less than before, with only a tiny percentage of businesses investing and utilizing notifications and texting for consumer attention and retention — while more than 30% don’t even have a website. The profit margins are already so tight that only those who “make it” can afford to borrow tech from Silicon Valley or the manufacturing industry to “modernize” themselves.
Whether people manage services for themselves or their household, multiple services are a nightmare to maintain, especially when unexpected life events happen. The current platform has become less sustainable every year and, consequently, every generation. The exponential rise of services with no significant advancement in technology created noise that obscured what and how people would want from services. The services industry has been placing the burden of “life management” on people’s shoulders with no sight of ever-improving — both unfair to all and, as such, a terrible design.
The more a person manages their life, the more stress and less living are happening. Less living means less creating. Less creation drains innovation, which stagnates and significantly lowers the services economy. Again, questionable design.
Moving forward, investments in fundamental research and development of next-gen services platforms are critical to the already stagnating local and global services economy. There is not much we can squeeze out of an already dry infrastructure and long-standing business models.
A Living Sustainable Platform
Indeed new thinking is needed. I guide that we begin with balancing the equation on both sides — business and consumer. At a high level, that would be for businesses to start operating on new infrastructure and platforms where external and internal logistics are standardized around a locality. No different how Amazon’s AWS and the likes standardized many operations and significantly reduced the cost to begin and operate a startup — except, in our case, most operations are in the physical world tied to logistics. It’s vital that the locality, by design, can scale from a small community to a city when needed. Both people and businesses share their requests and services transmitted and intercepted on a real-time grid within a locality. This platform’s real-time grid is intended for bi-directional communication of intentions and creations at any moment. More importantly, it facilitates and organizes multiple services based on a single intention to fulfill it most sustainably.
As an example, today, the intention of requiring a particular type of food requiring a ride entails the management of finding and placing an order, followed by getting a ride, and then finally finding and requesting a ride back after picking up the order. At any point in that process, things can go wrong due to unexpected events — such as sudden traffic changes significantly delaying your reach to the restaurant. At this point, the person may cancel their order, call the restaurant to delay the order, or ultimately arrive to pick up cold food — “life management” kicks in. In contrast, a live platform will continue to monitor and adapt to the changes occurring and compute the most plausible sustainable outcome based on the original intention with zero-to-minimal human intervention as possible.
This becomes even more relevant in situations where, for example, a mother is delayed during a doctor’s visit that dominos its effects further down the stream onto other services needing to be rescheduled — that’s a lot of calls.
Businesses created or moving into and participating on such a platform would be their first step into a sustainable future that continues to enhance and adapt. However, if we consider businesses on the said platform to be “products,” they would have to fulfill certain locally sustainable principles related to Society, Economy, and Ecology. In essence, a real-time logistics platform that delivers sustainable experiences would require products within it to drive towards:
[Society]
- A people-first approach design.
- A more elevated experience.
- An end-to-end personalized experience.
- Applied technologies are neutral participants.
- Safer, cleaner, and more accurate systems.
- Enhanced quality of life.
[Economy]
- Eliminating labor jobs.
- Increasing and empowering creative jobs.
- Advancing skills and pay across the board.
- Higher level of education.
- New opportunities.
[Ecology]
- Locally-driven.
- Waste and recycling.
- Renewable sources.
- Materials and processes that are congruent to nature.
- Modular and scalable.
Taking these into account, the future of Services operates and runs on a symbiotic live platform that, autonomously and sustainably, adapts and personalizes its services and products for each local individual within a scalable colony.
In conclusion and to all the entrepreneurs developing products that utilizes robotics, AI, and automation for the services industry, consider these principles as a guiding points to further accelerate our transition to a more sustainable and hopeful future.
