#VivaTech – What did I take away?

Since the World Economic Forum Event in Dalian in 2017 that I attended, the VivaTech event in Paris was by far the most inspirational one I have been to.

As always, one is left wondering how “small” we are in this world of break-neck speed disruption. But, what excited me more was 3 specific elements:

1.     How relevant the disruptions were and how focused they were in making people’s lives easier?

2.     Health is the “Oil” industry and billionaires and trillionaires will come from this space – On a lighter note, we might have Healthcare specialists owning football clubs in a decade or two ;) Much like people who own oil fields today.

3.     AXA was the only insurer at the event and it made me very proud to see how relevant our innovations are. We are clearly in the forefront of insurance disruption at a scale significantly larger than what some others are aiming to achieve!

Health insurers today aspire to build strong health services proposition encompassing care coordination across different age groups/conditions, tele-health, new age clinical support and more safer treatments. I was delighted to see many AXA supported start-ups at the event. These range from VR to Doctor co-ordination to tele-medicine and specific support services for patients (for e.g. Fertility treatments)

Here are some random examples I saw:

1.     Use of technology and AI to really support customer experience (For e.g. Virtual Hair Advisors)

2.     Use of chatbots and AI to automate customer communication and experience significantly (For e.g. guest services at Accor, Amazon contact centres, etc.)

3.     Sanofi aiding elderly healthcare in a world increasingly moving away from traditional family systems (covers a wide spectrum of detection and support services)

4.     Some of the health solutions from apparels and wearable companies will definitely help life expectancy, but customer experience still has some way to go. Imagine walking around with sensors all over the body and reminders on a regular basis on what we should do! The next phase of innovation for me would be to find the balance between intervention and annoyance!

5.     Power of mass customer acquisition and what that insight can do. Be it Facebook or Google (Future of what a Google Home can do was pretty inspiring, but also left wondering what impact it would have on people if they really don’t need to do much after coming home from lights to music to even cooking

6.     Increased focused on data privacy – One of the speakers mentioned more than 60 million people have opted for their data to be purged every 3-months and Google doesn’t really need it any longer as ML has already studied the behaviour

7.     High precision robotics operations – As they become more commercial, their costs will reduce drastically

8.     Physical robots which have part evolved and part at where I saw them as a 8/9-year old when my Dad gave me my 1^st robot

With this level of disruption all around, I can see 2 things happening

1.     The one with customer data will rule the world! One can always say – who didn’t know that ;) I never said I will say something you didn’t know. Ha ha ha J

2.     Innovation will become more and more specific and target “micro” moments that are scalable across multiple markets vs. all-encompassing innovations that are no different to what we tried in the past (large scale ideas with no clear foundation)