Biopharma executives that pursue leapfrog digital innovation will be those best positioned in 2022 to gain an edge over the competition, according to the consultants behind that publication. To better understand the biopharma industry's experience with digital innovation now and in the year ahead, the Deloitte team surveyed 150 biopharma leaders and found that digital technologies such as the cloud (49%), AI (38%), data lakes (33%), and wearables (33%) have been adopted in day-to-day operations. Other technologies such as quantum computing and digital twins are still nascent. Some 82% of respondents agreed that digitalization of operations will continue even after the pandemic ends. Digital innovation is a burning strategic priority for biopharma leaders, found the Deloitte publication.

With AI use continuing to grow in adoption throughout enterprise IT, Deloitte is creating a new Deloitte Center for AI Computing to advise its customers, explain the technology and help them use it in their ongoing business and growth plans. Designed to provide a cloud-accessible accelerated platform that Deloitte clients can use to test and explore various AI strategies and tools, the infrastructure features six Nvidia DGX A100 systems, Nvidia Mellanox networking, high-performance storage and Nvidia software. The platform will be physically hosted in Deloitte's datacenter in Hermitage, Tenn., but will also be part of a virtual service. Based on Nvidia's DGX POD reference architecture and harnessing the power of 48 A100 GPUs, the installation will serve as an AI acceleration engine for Deloitte's clients, the company said. The new facility was announced on Tuesday (March 2).

With AI use continuing to grow in adoption throughout enterprise IT, Deloitte is creating a new Deloitte Center for AI Computing to advise its customers, explain the technology and help them use it in their ongoing business and growth plans. Designed to provide a cloud-accessible accelerated platform that Deloitte clients can use to test and explore various AI strategies and tools, the infrastructure for the virtual center will be physically hosted in Deloitte's data center in Hermitage, Tenn., featuring an Nvidia DGX POD with six Nvidia DGX A100 systems as its core. The Deloitte Center for AI Computing will also be equipped with Nvidia Mellanox networking and high-performance storage to help clients create with AI, according to the company. The new facility was announced on Tuesday (March 2). "The Nvidia systems are being deployed this month and the center will be available to clients starting later in March," Nitin Mittal, the AI strategic growth offering leader for Deloitte Consulting, told EnterpriseAI.

Deloitte has released a slew of predictions for 2021, including in the enterprise tech, data and tech, media, telecom spaces. Deloitte picked resilience as the theme for its 12th annual tech trends report; a word that became a mantra in nearly every organization after their 2020 plans were upended by the coronavirus pandemic. In a webinar Monday, the firm identified nine trends separated into three groups that focus on how organizations can use technology to digitize, modernize, and enhance their businesses. Some have been spurred by COVID-19 and some by changes that have been ongoing for years, said Scott Buchholz, a managing director with Deloitte Consulting and emerging tech research director. The first group is dubbed "Strategy, engineered," and addresses the notion that the corporate and tech strategies "have really become intertwined as we move forward and increasingly become one and the same," Buchholz said.

New technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are transforming the workplace. The World Economic Forum's "Future of Jobs" report found 35% of the core skills required in the workforce will change between 2015 and 2020. As CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLC, Dan Helfrich sees firsthand the effects of digital transformation across a wide range of industries. He and his team work with companies every day on strategies to leverage the benefits of these new technologies while avoiding the pitfalls. At Salesforce, we empower teams to work as one to understand, anticipate, and respond to customer needs, so we talked to Helfrich about the future of work, the likely impact on workers, what it means for recruitment and training,and what business leaders can do to help their employees become valued members of the workforce of the future.

Businesses will reap more success from artificial intelligence projects by setting short-term, achievable goals instead of pursuing extremely ambitious ones, industry executives advise. Clive Swan is Oracle's senior vice president of applications development. The hype around AI, the set of statistical techniques that teaches software to make decisions based on past data, pushes many companies to rush adoption and launch "moon shots" that are hard to bring to fruition, said Clive Swan, Oracle senior vice president of applications development, at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in September. Typical mistakes include not adequately preparing corporate data or failing to augment it with third-party information sources such as news stories, press releases, and financial or corporate information, Swan said. Bill Briggs, chief technology officer at Deloitte Consulting, used a baseball metaphor, saying during another discussion at Oracle OpenWorld that businesses can do better playing "small ball."

Insurers and brokers are already using these technologies, to varying degrees. But it could be the best and fastest adopters of these technologies – those companies that dive in the deepest – who come out on top as the industry continues to rapidly evolve. According to Deloitte's "2018 Insurance Industry Outlook", robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in insurance is only going to increase in the next few years. Insurer spending on cognitive intelligence (CI) and AI technologies will rise 48% globally, "on a compound annual growth basis over five years," to reach $1.4 billion by 2021. It's sink or swim time for insurers adopting this tech – especially when it comes combining robotic and human workforces.

Insurers and brokers are already using these technologies, to varying degrees. But it could be the best and fastest adopters of these technologies – those companies that dive in the deepest – who come out on top as the industry continues to rapidly evolve. According to Deloitte's "2018 Insurance Industry Outlook", robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in insurance is only going to increase in the next few years. Insurer spending on cognitive intelligence (CI) and AI technologies will rise 48% globally, "on a compound annual growth basis over five years," to reach $1.4 billion by 2021. It's sink or swim time for insurers adopting this tech – especially when it comes combining robotic and human workforces.

Insurers and brokers are already using these technologies, to varying degrees. But it could be the best and fastest adopters of these technologies – those companies that dive in the deepest – who come out on top as the industry continues to rapidly evolve. According to Deloitte's "2018 Insurance Industry Outlook", robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in insurance is only going to increase in the next few years. Insurer spending on cognitive intelligence (CI) and AI technologies will rise 48% globally, "on a compound annual growth basis over five years," to reach $1.4 billion by 2021. It's sink or swim time for insurers adopting this tech – especially when it comes combining robotic and human workforces.

To help clients rapidly develop capabilities for addressing some of tomorrow's most complex challenges, Deloitte Consulting today announced its intention to team with SAP America, Inc. to build a new suite of services for enabling digital transformation. Deloitte Consulting and SAP are expected to co-innovate on the development of offerings that will help organizations benefit from the expanded SAP Leonardo portfolio--to automate processes, gain deeper insights for decision-making, and deliver innovation and value throughout the enterprise. SAP Leonardo is a Digital Innovation System that combines machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, blockchain technology, analytics, and big data on SAP Cloud Platform to enable rapid innovation that can scale across the entire organization. Deloitte Consulting and SAP also intend to create new "micro-services" that extend the capabilities of SAP Leonardo, with an initial plan to focus on offerings that address evolving machine learning, analytics, and IoT needs in finance and throughout the supply chain. "As businesses strive to adopt digital business models, they are seeking trusted technology that enables them to operate with more agility, to deliver more effective results and to simplify their operations," said Rob Enslin, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE and President of Cloud Business Group, SAP.