ANALYSTS and pundits did not foresee Covid-19 coming in 2020, and that the virus would accelerate the digitalisation trend – a seismic or tectonic shift in its own right – resulting from the fragmentation of physical processes and the emphasis on a low-touch economy as part of compliance with the standard operating procedures to break and contain transmission.
Not all digitalisation trends are precipitated (in the sense that they have had their momentum accelerated) by the unprecedented spread of Covid-19, though. Some had been in the works for years, and the breakthroughs only came last year.
Likewise, digitalisation trends for 2021 will reflect similar developments. That is, Covid-19 would have been the impetus and catalyst – in contradistinction to the “cause” – for the rise in some digitalisation trends, while others had been pursued beforehand.
Let’s take a look at some of the digital lessons from 2020, as well as look ahead to 2021.
Covid-19 has encouraged and enhanced the use of cloud services for physical operations, such as the cloud kitchen. What this means is that cooking and delivery services can be centralised rather than come from disparate collection points, like various restaurants, although not necessarily.
The underlying purpose is that dine-in (front-of-house) areas are removed from the overall business process, thus saving costs (labour/manpower, other operational or overhead costs, i.e. dining assets, and not least, space).
In Malaysia, in particular, and the region, in general, online food delivery businesses, like GrabFood (through Grab e-Kitchen) and Foodpanda, have been leveraging the cloud kitchen concept due to high demand and its cost-effectiveness. The trend of the cloud kitchen, which came to the fore in 2020, is expected to grow and expand in the major conurbations of the Klang Valley, in tandem with the growth and explosion of e-commerce in the country.
There is also the trend of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), whereby businesses and enterprises can save costs and physical space.
Data-management and cloud specialist Nutanix defines HCI as the “combination of common data-centre 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), a leading information and communications technology market intelligence firm, has predicted that the HCI market will grow US$7.64 billion (RM30.73 billion) in 2021. In Malaysia, local logistics and express carrier giant Gdex has adopted the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud to keep up with demand 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 the tourism sector, which is the country’s third major exporter and foreign-exchange earner.
AR/VR is the digital gateway and portal to the on-site tourism experience. Usually, it is for marketing and promotional purposes, and allows potential on-site tourists to enjoy an audio-visual sampling of the “full package” on offer – the real world, tactual experience. All one needs to access the virtual experience is a smartphone, laptop, tablet or personal computer.
Moving forward, the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), which is basically the combination of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, is making steady, even rapid, headway.
To quote Bernard Marr in 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.
To further quote him: “When AI is added to the IoT, it means that those devices can analyse data, and make decisions and act on that data without involvement by humans.” 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 digitalisation trends, online journal Nature on November 30 last year reported that after years of painstaking efforts, finally, an AI called AlphaFold developed by Google offshoot DeepMind has achieved a gargantuan leap in computational biology, namely determining 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 their molecular structure would yield insights into the mysteries of life, so that finding treatments and cures to such intractable diseases as Parkinson’s, producing viral drugs for Covid-19, or identifying suitable enzymes that biodegrade industrial wastes is basically tied to protein structures.
According to the DeepMind website, AlphaFold was taught (deep learning) by reproducing to it the sequences and structures of around 100,000 known proteins. This year, we can 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 (carbon capture and storage) 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 and 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 is fast making its mark on supply chain management, with strategic collaborations between the public and private sectors. In Malaysia, the use of blockchain by the Customs Department will ease and facilitate the import-export transactions of private sector stakeholders (shipping/logistics, traders).
Specifically, the TradeLens platform – jointly developed by AP Moller-Maersk and IBM, and based on the collaboration Application Programming Interface concept – ensures that all logistic activities, such as haulage, warehousing, shipping and freight forwarding, at both the domestic and international levels, can now be wholly integrated.
Notwithstanding, will quantum supremacy, which Google has claimed to achieve, constrain the full potential of blockchain technology?
According to Deloitte, someone with an operational-quantum computer who has access to the public key (public address) could falsify the transaction signature known as “hashing”, which is an encryption mechanism (in the form of a cryptographic function) serving as “proof of work” that is linkable to another block of transaction data (hence, forming a blockchain), and therefore, hack to gain entry to the private key (i.e. for the purpose of decrypting the signature).
Be that as it may, quantum computing could easily be deployed in blockchain technology to fend off would-be hackers or rogue miners.
And not least, robotic process automation (RPA) is increasingly used in financial technology (fintech). In its Fintech and Digital Banking 2025 Report Asia Pacific, IDC said financial liberalisation, the drive towards cost reduction, intense competition from counterparts and peer-to-peer players, wafer-thin net interest margins, etc, are catalysing banks to further automate, e.g. through RPA software that enables computers to process the manual workload of business processes more efficiently and effectively (such as triggering error-free responses).
Finally, autonomous driving will soon be the in-thing in Malaysia, as it is in other parts of the world, not least across the Causeway in Singapore. Established in 2016, eMooVit Technology Sdn Bhd is a local start-up specialising in driverless agnostic vehicle software for urban-environment routes.
The software can be used in different applications, such as first-/last-mile transportation, and logistic and utility solutions. On December 23 last year, eMoovit was reported to be the first 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 Edge Markets reported that the 7km Cyberjaya Malaysia Autonomous Vehicle Testing Route was jointly developed by Futurise and the Transport Ministry under the National Regulatory Sandbox initiative for the development of autonomous vehicles, or self-driving cars.
All in all, Malaysia is well-positioned to leverage all of the highlighted digitalisation trends, in one way or another. – The Vibes, January 2, 2021
Jason Loh Seong Wei is head of social, law and human rights at Emir Research, an independent think-tank focused on strategic policy recommendations based on rigorous research
