Listen to the audio version of the article
The potential for digital change? Huge. But even greater is the impact of the double transition that is accompanying society towards a more technological and at the same time more sustainable world. Almost eight out of ten organizations confirm that they are tackling this evolution path but only a quarter of these have fully exploited the capabilities and advantages deriving from the use of technology. This is stated in a recent study by Capgemini (“The Eco-Digital Era™: The dual transition to a sustainable and digital economy”), in collaboration with the Digital Data Design Institute of Harvard.
The study is based on the opinions of 1,500 managers of large organizations and 150 start-ups active in 14 countries, including Italy.
The race towards what analysts define as the “eco-digital economy” is destined to double in value by 2028, developing a turnover of 33 trillion dollars (over 29% of Europe’s GDP) and bringing important results also from an environmental perspective. According to the report, over the past five years the implementation of digital solutions and tools has helped companies reduce average energy consumption by almost a quarter and greenhouse gas emissions by 21 percent. By 2028, the percentage reduction in CO2 production achievable thanks to digital technologies should exceed the increase in emissions attributed to the development and use of the technologies themselves.
Protagonists: data, analytics tools and cloud
The “eco-digital” era will generate value with respect to some specific prerogatives, such as being more collaborative at an ecosystem level and being able to more easily enable new business models and greater cost efficiency, thanks to the combined use of data, cloud, platforms, connected products and services. In this regard, seven out of ten organizations agree that digitally oriented business strategies will become a determining factor for revenue growth in the next three to five years, while 60% of companies say they want to reach their objectives faster of sustainability thanks to the support of technologies.
If data, analytics tools and cloud will be the items that will provide the most impactful business advantages in the next five years, important growth levers are also mainstream and emerging innovations such as generative artificial intelligence, edge computing and synthetic biology, currently already taken into consideration (or close to being taken into consideration) by approximately half (48% to be precise) of the companies surveyed. The change, as Harvard experts explain, is truly cross-sectoral and one of the biggest challenges that organizations must manage is knowing what to centralize and what to decentralize in terms of platform architecture and data governance.