ANALYSTS and pundits didn’t foresee Covid-19 coming in 2020 and that the virus would accelerate the digitalisation trend, a seismic or tectonic shift in its own right.
It was a result of the fragmentation of physical processes and the emphasis on low touch as part of compliance with standard operating procedures to break and contain the transmission.
Not all digitalisation trends were precipitated by the virus though. Some would have been in the works for years and the breakthroughs only came this year. Digitalisation trends for 2021 would also reflect similar developments. Let’s take a look at some of the digital lessons from 2020 and for 2021.
Covid-19 has encouraged and enhanced the use of cloud services for physical operations such as cloud kitchen. What this means is that cooking and delivery services could be centralised rather than from disparate collection points such as various restaurants although not necessarily.
The underlying purpose is that dining-in areas are removed from the overall business process, saving costs.
In Malaysia in particular, and the region in general, online food delivery businesses such as GrabFood and FoodPanda have been leveraging on the cloud kitchen concept. The trend for cloud kitchen which came to the fore in 2020 is expected to expand in the major conurbations of the Klang Valley in tandem with the growth and explosion of e-commerce in the country.
There’s also the trend of hyperconverged infrastructure/technology (HCI) whereby businesses and enterprises can save costs and physical space. Data management and cloud specialist Nutanix defines HCI as the “combination of common datacentre hardware using locally attached storage resources with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays”.
International Data Corporation (IDC) has predicted that the HCI market will grow US$7.64 billion (RM31 billion) in 2021. In Malaysia, local logistics and express carrier giant Gdex has adopted Nutanix Hybrid Cloud to keep up with demands in e-commerce for scalability and business-to-consumer operations.
And then, we have augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR) which is increasing its presence in our tourism industry. Again, Covid-19 which has resulted in partial lockdowns, and in Malaysia’s case the movement control order, has massively impacted our tourism sector, the third major exporter and foreign exchange earner.
AR/VR is the digital gateway and portal to the on-site tourism experience. All one needs to access the virtual experience is a smart phone, laptop, tablet or personal computer.
Moving forward, the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) which is basically a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) is making rapid headway.
To quote from Bernard Marr of Forbes magazine, IoT devices such as sensors, universal remote controllers, and biometric scanners can be likened to a digital nervous system while AI is the brain.
With the advent of 5G technology and smart cities, AIoT is expected to emerge as part of the new norm in the near future in our cities and homes, too.
While not exactly part of the digitalisation trends, the Nature online journal on Nov 30 reported that after years of painstaking efforts, an AI called AlphaFold developed by Google offshoot DeepMind achieved a gargantuan leap in computational biology. It determined a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence or what is popularly known as “protein folding” where “structure is function” (an axiom of molecular biology).
As proteins are the building-blocks of life, unravelling its molecular structure would yield insights into the mysteries of life so that finding treatments and cure for such intractable diseases as Parkinson’s, producing viral drugs for Covid-19, and identifying suitable enzymes that biodegrade industrial wastes are basically tied to protein structures.
Come 2021, we could expect to herald the beginning of a new chapter related to many scientific and industrial applications which hopefully extend to agriculture and food production, air pollution control and water treatment, among others.
Connected to that AI breakthrough in predicting protein folding is, of course, quantum computing that represents the leap from bits (binary – 0 or 1) to qubits (0 & 1 at the same time) – based on quantum physics and mechanics (of the simultaneity-duality of supposition and entanglement).
For now, quantum computing can be deployed for complex tasks such as predicting the 3D shape of protein folding and structure.
As for blockchain or distributed ledger technology, it’s fast making its mark in supply chain management – with the strategic collaboration between public and private sectors.
In Malaysia, the use of blockchain by the Royal Malaysian Customs Department will ease and facilitate import-export transactions of private sector stakeholders (shipping/logistics, traders). Specifically, the TradeLens platform, as jointly developed by AP Moller-Maersk with IBM and based on the Collaboration Application Programming Interface concept, ensures that all logistic activities such as haulage, warehousing, shipping and freight forwarding at domestic and international levels can now be wholly integrated.
And not least, robotic process automation (RPA) is increasingly used in fintech. In its Fintech and Digital Banking 2025 Asia Pacific report, IDC said that financial liberalisation, cost-reduction, intense competition from counterparts as well as peer-to-peer players and wafer-thin net interest margin are catalysing banks to further automate through RPA software that enables computers to process manual workload.
Finally, autonomous driving will soon be an in-thing in Malaysia as it is in other parts of the world, not least across the Causeway. eMooVit Technology Sdn Bhd is a local 2016 start-up specialising in driverless agnostic vehicle software for urban environment routes.
eMoovit was reported to be the maiden company to use Malaysia’s first self-driving vehicle testing route as announced by Futurise Sdn Bhd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cyberview Sdn Bhd. The 7km Cyberjaya Malaysia Autonomous Vehicle Testing Route was jointly developed by Futurise and the Ministry of Transport under the National Regulatory Sandbox initiative for the development of self-driving vehicles.
All in all, Malaysia is well-positioned to leverage on all of the highlighted digitalisation trends, one way or another.
Jason Loh Seong Wei is Head of Social, Law & Human Rights at EMIR Research.Comments:letters@thesundaily.com
