SAP’s Chief Designer and Futurist Martin Wezowski will talk about technology and the future of work at e’ffect 2020: The Ultimate Innovation Experience Event on 17th September.
This year’s e’ffect promises to deliver a new online and immersive innovative experience for its audience bringing in industry experts and renowned business leaders including SAP’s design “rock star” Martin Wezowski. As 2020 continues to unfold, challenging the survival of many organisations around the world, Wezowski’s e’ffect episode on “The Future of Work” could not have come at a better time.
As sort of a preview to Wezowski’s e’ffect session, he shared in BBC StoryWorks how humans in the workplace and technology evolve together in shaping the future of work.
Being the Chief Designer for SAP’s Technology & Innovation Strategy Team, Wezowski is in charge of creating future outlooks, strategies, and products as well as define and run innovation frameworks. Outside SAP, he is also a well-renowned speaker, panelist, and guest lecturer in some of the notable global events and conferences. As a Global Futurist, he is passionate about sharing with his audience the future of technology and design including the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
“Futures are designable – it’s up to you to make them somewhere we want to live in. There is an infinite possibility of things you can do. You don’t predict the future. You work for a desirable one,” he stressed.
In the upcoming virtual event e’ffect 2020, Wezowski will also discuss why curiosity and creativity become the key skillsets of this decade and the importance of agility for smarter and efficient working.
The Skillsets of the Decade
As organisations speed up their automation journey that now goes beyond Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Wezowksi explained the critical role of the people in creating meaningful work that truly adds value and complements technological progress. He emphasised that innately human attributes like playing, experimenting, imagining, and capitalising on our emotional intelligence and contextual knowledge will lead to “empathic symbiosis” with machines.
“Curiosity and creativity are one of the skillsets of this decade. It is not purely engineering – you can read that in a book. Everything you can be instructed on is less important to have in your blood and your education. It’s things you can’t search for online,” he explained.
SAP’s Role in the Future of Work
Wezowski foresees that traditional manual jobs involving spatial or memory capabilities may soon be automated alongside installation and maintenance tasks. He also predicts that algorithms will soon assume critical roles within the supply chain including financial resources management, logistics, and contracting among others.
“SAP’s job is to bring forward high-value work. Artificial intelligence will automate the boring, the repetitive, the insignificant, and mundane. Machines will be ever more effective and efficient in the known tasks, the repetitive and predictable,” the SAP Chief Designer added.
He imagines that machine learning will further improve AI to guarantee better business decisions and that we will soon adopt visual augmentation devices and several more wearables.
“There is no next big thing; however, there is an infinite amount of things coming together. This is why, at SAP, we are building this one platform, integrating data from sources we could not even imagine into one piece.”
To him, we are now at the “me-we era” where the focus on the individual evolves and collaboration thrives. In many ways, technology has made everything and every one accessible in these unprecedented times.
Wezowski underscored that it is essential to embrace technology without reservations because innovation will lead to a thriving workforce where “competitiveness is replaced with the complementary” that will lead to “completion”.
For free access to e’ffect 2020: The Ultimate Innovation Experience Event, register here