Video
The rise of digital technology has changed how companies operate across all industries. In this short video, Elizabeth Spaulding, who leads Bain's Digital practice, discusses four macro trends that will further expand digital’s influence.
Read the transcript below.
ELIZABETH SPAULDING: Well, I think we've been seeing the importance of digital in many of the industries that we work with for the last several years, if not decades. But originally, it was really mostly about our technology clients, software, enterprise sales, things that were really having technology at the center of them. And then over the last several years, it's become the central tenant for most of our retail clients who have been hugely impacted by e-commerce and then increasingly in financial services clients.
But what's becoming obvious is that digital is impacting every industry, every client that we work with. And really at the core of that are a few big macro trends that we look at within the digital practice overall. One is just the huge proliferation of data. There is an anecdote that one of our advanced analytics people always talks about, that 80% of data was created in the last 18 months. That's a huge mega trend that's impacting every one of our clients.
Another big piece of it is just the connectivity of devices and the continued increase in computing power. That's going to affect even our industrials clients increasingly as we think about digital being embedded into devices and that same advent of data affecting everything that they do. And then more broadly, just that connectivity piece: if there are three billion people connected today, over the next several years, it'll be eight billion people. So how will that impact every client that we work with today? It's hard to believe that any industry we work with won't be affected.