Floor mats, fabric and carpeting is made from recycled materials. Design touches show off links to other Stellantis products, like the rotary gear shifter, which employs a Jeep-like tactile pattern and a three-screened approach to the dashboard. The cockpit is able to be customized to sync with the preferences of each passenger in addition to providing navigation, voice assistance, e-commerce marketplace and payment services. Screens, designed to appear as "gloss black sculptures" can be simplified and grouped, depending on the needs of the user.
Users can also link up their home security and camera systems to the in-car tech, allowing them to view imagery at home while on the go. Built-in cameras feature at every seat, enabling occupants to participate in a video conference from the cabin without having to open their laptop.
Over-the-air OTA updates, a common technology offered in most modern autos, comes courtesy of the Chrysler's Brain. STLA AutoDrive, a Level 3 autonomous driving technology that allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel under certain conditions, can be upgraded via OTA updates.
Chrysler is not expected to bring the Airflow to market as it is seen today. Instead the vehicle points to the future of Stellantis technology, matched with design aesthetics meant to push the brand forward. Earlier this year, Nvidia unveiled Omniverse -- a software collaboration platform that allows developers to share their digital worlds with each other like sharing a document over the cloud.
The company has been working on this platform for several years, and it's built to accurately simulate physical movement in a virtual world and bring together apps and tools to speed up the development of the metaverse.
Omniverse is a lucrative opportunity for Nvidia. It sells for an annual license fee like a typical subscription-as-a-service platform. But the push into software could push its profits higher relative to revenue, which is why the stock might be worth considering even at its current high stock price.
One top software provider that could benefit enormously from the growth of the metaverse is Unity Software. Unity provides software solutions that are used to create, run, and monetize real-time 2D and 3D content across mobile devices, PCs, game consoles, and virtual reality devices.
Weta is the software studio that created many of the special effects used so effectively in blockbuster movies like Lord of the Rings , Wonder Woman , and Avatar , and management plans to offer the basic technology behind that was instrumental in creating those effects in a cloud-based version. This will allow millions of consumers to create content on social media and gaming platforms, which serve as the building blocks of the metaverse.
The company is still in the early stage of expanding its software offering to non-gaming use cases in other industries. If you are looking for a pure-play option to invest in the metaverse, Roblox is your best bet.
It has 47 million daily active users that come to its platform to play games, but management sees potential for the metaverse to appeal to a broad audience beyond those interested in gaming. Virtual concerts are already becoming a popular activity on Roblox. In July, Roblox teamed up with Sony Music to bring more recording artists to the platform.
Founder Jack Ma has become a household name. From its inception, in , Alibaba experienced great growth on its e-commerce platform. Over the course of the meeting, our disjointed observations and ideas about e-commerce trends began to coalesce into a larger view of the future, and by the end, we had agreed on a vision. Our strategic imperative was to make sure that the platform provided all the resources, or access to the resources, that an online business would need to succeed, and hence supported the evolution of the ecosystem.
The ecosystem we built was simple at first: We linked buyers and sellers of goods. As technology advanced, more business functions moved online—including established ones, such as advertising, marketing, logistics, and finance, and emerging ones, such as affiliate marketing, product recommenders, and social media influencers.
Alibaba today is not just an online commerce company. It is what you get if you take all functions associated with retail and coordinate them online into a sprawling, data-driven network of sellers, marketers, service providers, logistics companies, and manufacturers. In other words, Alibaba does what Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Google, FedEx, wholesalers, and a good portion of manufacturers do in the United States, with a healthy helping of financial services for garnish.
Why has so much value and market power emerged so quickly? Because of new capabilities in network coordination and data intelligence that all these companies put to use. The ecosystems they steward are vastly more economically efficient and customer-centric than traditional industries. These firms follow an approach I call smart business, and I believe it represents the dominant business logic of the future. Smart business emerges when all players involved in achieving a common business goal—retailing, for example, or ride sharing—are coordinated in an online network and use machine-learning technology to efficiently leverage data in real time.
This tech-enabled model, in which most operational decisions are made by machines, allows companies to adapt dynamically and rapidly to changing market conditions and customer preferences, gaining tremendous competitive advantage over traditional businesses. Ample computing power and digital data are the fuel for machine learning, of course. The more data and the more iterations the algorithmic engine goes through, the better its output gets. Data scientists come up with probabilistic prediction models for specific actions, and then the algorithm churns through loads of data to produce better decisions in real time with every iteration.
These prediction models become the basis for most business decisions. Thus machine learning is more than a technological innovation; it will transform the way business is conducted as human decision making is increasingly replaced by algorithmic output. Ant Microloans provides a striking example of what this future will look like. When Alibaba launched Ant, in , the typical loan given by large banks in China was in the millions of dollars.
Banks were reluctant to service companies that lacked any kind of credit history or even adequate documentation of their business activities. As a consequence, tens of millions of businesses in China were having real difficulties securing the money necessary to grow their operations. At Alibaba, we realized we had the ingredient for creating a high-functioning, scalable, and profitable SME lending business: the huge amount of transaction data generated by the many small businesses using our platform.
In , we bundled this lending operation together with Alipay, our very successful payments business, to create Ant Financial Services. We gave the new venture that name to capture the idea that we were empowering all the little but industrious, antlike companies. How is this possible?
When faced with potential borrowers, lending institutions need answer only three basic questions: Should we lend to them, how much should we lend, and at what interest rate? Once sellers on our platforms gave us authorization to analyze their data, we were well positioned to answer those questions.
Our algorithms can look at transaction data to assess how well a business is doing, how competitive its offerings are in the market, whether its partners have high credit ratings, and so on. Ant uses that data to compare good borrowers those who repay on time with bad ones those who do not to isolate traits common in both groups. Those traits are then used to calculate credit scores.
All lending institutions do this in some fashion, of course, but at Ant the analysis is done automatically on all borrowers and on all their behavioral data in real time. At the same time, the algorithms that calculate the scores are themselves evolving in real time, improving the quality of decision making with each iteration.
Technologies such as artificial intelligence AI , Internet of Things IoT , cloud, and blockchain can catalyze new business or operating models, help new entrants disrupt the sector, and enable incumbents to reach new levels of performance. For those incumbents, a lot may be at stake, and even more may be possible. But to thrive in this bright future, power and utility companies will need to develop new capabilities and transform their working environment.
This report will discuss the multitude of forces disrupting and driving change in the power and utilities sector, explore the exciting future the industry is moving toward, and help companies plot a digital path to thrive in that future. Disruptive forces are transforming the electric power sector, and many power company leaders are planning their digital journeys based on the impact of these forces figure 1. The forces span four categories:.
In fact, capital expenditures have trended upward in recent years as utilities boost spending to upgrade aging infrastructure; harden systems against increasingly severe climate events; modernize and digitize systems and processes; defend against increasingly virulent cyberattacks; and address the growing mandate for cleaner energy sources from legislators, regulators, and customers. Such rapid and multipronged change may, in turn, compel organizational and cultural transformation to manage and adapt to new technologies.
In many of these challenges lie opportunities to create value through innovation. Another well-established trend is the acceleration of technological advances across industries as innovation drives rapid cost declines for key building blocks such as computing power, data storage, and internet bandwidth.
Faster, cheaper, more powerful computing and improved connectivity are fueling growing deployment of technologies such as sensors, mobile, advanced analytics, robotics, additive manufacturing, cloud computing, IoT, AI, and virtual and augmented reality. Such innovations are ushering in new and disruptive competitive risks—and opportunities—for enterprises that have historically enjoyed dominant positions in their industries, including the power industry.
The power and utilities industry is seeing unprecedented opportunities for innovation and growth from rapid technological advances and cost declines in areas such as solar power, battery storage, wind power, electric vehicles, smart buildings, two-way power flows, microgrids, and more.
Of course, these opportunities are also opening doors for startups, entrepreneurs, and companies from adjacent industries who may compete with incumbents and disrupt the industry. New twists on design, processes, and ways of doing business also offer opportunities and fresh ways to approach challenges—or to challenge the status quo.
For example, human-centered design, agile and adaptive business practices, trends shaping the future of work, crowd-sourcing, the sharing and subscription economy, and mega-platform ecosystems are all accelerating disruption and amplifying opportunities to start or grow enterprises and industries.
A common thread runs through these four types of forces—digital. Digital technologies can act as catalysts that help incumbents or new entrants develop new business and operating models, such as using advanced analytics to segment customers and target prospects for new services. Or they can be disruptors that open the door to new market entrants—such as technology platforms that aggregate output from distributed energy resource DER owners and bid it into wholesale electricity markets.
Nothing is protected. Digital technologies can also be enablers , enabling new levels of performance, such as cutting maintenance time and costs by using automated drones backed by cognitive capabilities to inspect assets in the field. To understand how companies are investing in the connected web of digital and physical technologies that enables digital transformation, known as Industry 4.
The survey was fielded in association with GE Digital in spring by Forbes Insights, and captured insights from respondents in seven industrial sectors, including power and utilities.
The responses discussed here are from the 81 respondents in the power and utilities sector. In the survey, the events and market shifts that power sector leaders said impact their businesses the most track closely with the trends outlined earlier. Almost half 48 percent cited changes in fuel prices and availability, most likely referring not just to an abundance of relatively low-priced natural gas, but more broadly to the rapid decline in the cost of solar and wind power, which increasingly undercut other resources for power generation see figure 2.
New market entrants, increasingly frequent cyberattacks, and natural disasters are also high on the list of impactful events and concerns. Many respondents also noted shifting customer behaviors, electric vehicles, and wind power in another nod to the new products and technologies that are helping to transform their sector. Going forward, power and utility companies will likely see increased opportunities to create value based on data, insights, and services, in addition to moving electrons.
The following three vignettes illustrate digitally enabled innovations that are coming into focus over the next few years from the perspective of the future utility customer, power company employee, and asset manager.
The platform delivers a personalized, data-driven customer experience in real time, as well as services such as home energy management enabled by AI; transactions management; and other products and services in addition to electricity. Figure 3 illustrates a sampling of customer services, products, and applications offered through the platform. Some are already available today but integrating them all on one platform, accessible through multiple channels, is a goal of many power companies.
Figure 3 also indicates some of the digital technologies and other requirements necessary before these services can be offered, though the list is not comprehensive. The power company employee of the future is a new-generation, tech-savvy professional who relies on connected yet independent systems, often collaborating with bots that integrate AI to accomplish tasks.
Most processes are automated, freeing employees from routine, and sometimes dangerous, tasks and enabling them to focus on performing highly complex, customized, and unpredictable work. Through new approaches such as design thinking and employee journey maps, employee experiences are understood and improved, while tools such as employee net promoter scores measure employee satisfaction. Figure 4 illustrates a sampling of features and benefits of the future power company employee experience.
The future power company has real-time situational awareness of its generation, transmission, and distribution assets. Operational staff manages data as much as assets. A network of sensors, drones, cameras, and other devices provides a continuous stream of data on the status and performance of power plants, lines, towers, substations, transformers, poles, and other equipment.
Dynamic visualizations display ambient temperature, air quality, moisture, voltage, current, fuel and water input, electricity and emissions output, load, vegetation growth, and other data on operations, performance, or potential safety hazards. The company also uses 3D printing to save costs by producing needed parts such as spare parts for turbines in house. A distribution system operator DSO in Europe uses an asset analytics platform that enables risk-based asset management and investment planning.
Using AI, visualization, and simulations incorporating data on voltage, load, grid topology, and more, the platform helps operators assess available capacity on the system and plan for future needs. It also helps them utilize assets more efficiently and prepare to manage the growing influx of distributed energy resources—all while keeping costs down and maintaining power quality.
Generation assets are becoming more flexible, with the intelligence to self-ramp, self-balance, and self-diagnose.
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