Cape Town - In an era when the lexicon of tech (bytes, bots, cloud, multi-touch) seems to change almost as fast as the technology itself it might seem like a great idea for a company to appoint a chief digital officer and be done with it.
Yet, be warned, this will seem like Luddite madness to some.
Michael Fertik, executive chairman and founder of Reputation.com, on Thursday told a session at the 60th Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit, being held at the Cape Town Convention Centre from June 15-17, that having a chief digital officer was a bit like having a chief gravity officer.
Addressing a session entitled the Digital Disruptors Have Their Say, Fertik asked the audience to imagine a company saying: “There is a thing called gravity; it affects everyone and everything; let's get this one guy to take care of it.”
The session had posed the question, 'What exactly can be done to ensure your business is able to make the most of the digital world and swim the distance'. The panel was billed as some of the “biggest disruptors out there” and included Vivienne Ming, co-founder of Socos, and Facebook's global head of consumer goods strategy, Kate Sayre.
Whether or not a company has a chief digital officer, or indeed a chief gravity officer, Ming made the point quite convincingly that the incredible power of tech today meant that those who mastered it had “super powers”, which could be applied to do good or not-so-good.
In support of her theory, she described her work, from developing big brother-type applications such as face recognition software to help the CIA decide on a person's guilt, to creating a platform that uses artificial intelligence to analyse needs of children according to various data inputs and deliver tailored daily activities.
The programme, which Ming said the Nelson Mandela Foundation would soon be making available to parents in South Africa, was designed to send the parents messages every day about relevant activities to stimulate their children's very specific needs and capabilities.
Ming made artificial intelligence and the pervasiveness of tech seem like an all-singing, all dancing personal assistant when she talked about perhaps receiving a message from her phone saying that she was at that moment walking past that restaurant she had read a nice review about three weeks ago.
As it happened, the phone would tell her, she had a gap in her diary and the restaurant had a table available. Would she like to book that table, the phone would then suggest.
Facebook's Sayre also focused on convenience when she talked about being able to contact mothers at the moment they started to think, oh no what's for dinner.
The message would be useful (perhaps including menu ideas) and actionable (shopping lists, clickthroughs to grocery services), thereby delivering both a service and a brand message.
Whether is it a chief digital officer or a facebook robot/assistant you are after the speed at which technological innovation is defining consumer choices does seem to be defying gravity.
AFRICAN NEWS AGENCY