i-Human: A.I.’s Massive Cultural Mindset Shift

Duncan Wardle is the Former Head of Innovation & Creativity at the Walt Disney Company. He is a provocative and results-driven business consultant, who applies his creative talents and unconventional methods to help companies and individuals get to those breakthrough ideas that lead to extraordinary results.

With the next decade shaping up quickly to be the most disruptive decade in over a century, companies that have continually iterated to achieve quarterly results will now find themselves needing to innovate just to survive.

I see the following trends as the most disruptive:

1. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is not only predicted to eliminate at least one tenth of the workforce in the next decade, it is estimated by some that it will be thousands of times more intelligent than the human race in the same time span.
   
2. PURPOSE OVER PROFIT – Generation Z will challenge every aspect of corporate life as they value purpose over profit. Not only will they not buy products and services of brands they don’t believe in. They don’t want to work for them either. So how will they stay relevant? Companies that continue to put quarterly results in front of the consumer, because that’s the way it’s always worked, will find themselves gone.
   
3. 3D PRINTING will have an unfathomable impact on everything we touch. The traditional tool industry will be obsolete, not to mention the production, packing and shipping industries as we simply print things at home, in houses printed in 3D. So what does that mean for the housing market?
   
4. SOCIAL CHANGE – with the ever increasing advances in technology, be it streaming services such as Disney +, advances in augmented and virtual reality, all blurring the lines between the movie industry, the gaming industry, shopping online with Amazon, eating at home with Uber Eats, will the next generation still share our need to go out to visit physical assets like shopping malls, theme parks, concerts or sporting venues?
   
5. MARKETING WILL BE REPLACED BY EXPERIENCE – those that understand this principle will not only survive, they will thrive. Those that continue to market AT consumers at the expense of creating really great experiences will be gone.
   
6. SO HOW WILL WE SURVIVE THIS ONSLAUGHT OF CHANGE? What will become the most employable skill sets of the next decade? The 4 core human traits we are all born with! Creativity, Imagination, Curiousity and Intuition. Why? Simply because, in the foreseeable future at any rate, they are the 4 skill sets that will not likely be replicated by or programmed into Artificial Intelligence.