Business patterns of the past couple of years have affirmed the critical role that digital transformation trends play in an organization's ability to carry out its mission. Forward-thinking organizations must focus their efforts on enabling their people, and the people they serve, to thrive in the more distributed, more digitalized world we're living in. In 2022, it's on leaders to not just innovate, but also take what's worked and expand on it, so teams can continue to work more efficiently and collaborate more effectively in the face of unpredictable and rapid change. Here are the most promising, accessible and impactful technology solutions for organizations to focus on launching -- or perfecting -- in 2022. Legacy systems weren't designed to handle remote work at scale and immediacy, but your distributed workforce needs to stay connected.

The industrial advancements of the past -- from machines enabling mass production to the introduction of computers and automation -- have all led to the tipping point we are navigating today. Organizations of all sizes and across sectors are increasingly adopting advanced digital technologies. This will transform the way we work as drastically as past achievements did a century ago. Leaders need to ensure their organizations can seamlessly navigate these shifts and have the necessary resources to drive the promise of digitization forward. While businesses had some time to prepare for digital transformation, the pandemic propelled those efforts.

From the bottom of the oceans to the skies above us, natural evolution has filled our planet with a vast and diverse array of lifeforms, with approximately 8 million species adapted to their surroundings in a myriad of ways. Yet 100 years after Karel Čapek coined the term robot, the functional abilities of many species still surpass the capabilities of current human engineering, which has yet to convincingly develop methods of producing robots that demonstrate human-level intelligence, move and operate seamlessly in challenging environments, and are capable of robust self-reproduction. But could robots ever reproduce? This, undoubtedly, forms a pillar of "life" as shared by all natural organisms. A team of researchers from the UK and the Netherlands have recently demonstrated a fully automated technology to allow physical robots to repeatedly breed, evolving their artificial genetic code over time to better adapt to their environment.

From Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" in 1927 to the titanic "Terminator" franchise of present day, popular culture has reflected an unwavering fear of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation for decades. While the entertainment industry may have drawn inspiration from public anxiety over the past century, the broader reasons for aversion to digital evolution have changed. At the present, the more common fear of AI stems from concerns about displacement and annihilation of job roles across industries, as intelligent, AI-related technologies like process automation and digital content services continue to evolve and eliminate manual tasks that were once managed by human hands and minds. While this digital evolution may mean the end of certain roles in the future of work, for most it will more likely mean a simultaneous evolution of skills and responsibilities in human-based occupations. Forecasts indicate that all jobs will be impacted by AI and automation technologies in the future, but that doesn't mean those jobs will be replaced.

Digital transformation's prevalence in everything we read is a signifier that the way we live and work is going to continue to evolve over the next decade. In this blog, I want to highlight a few use cases showing how disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be used in the office of the CFO to increase productivity, simplify processes, and support decision-making. Analytics: Since I have a background in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), I have been thinking about how digital assistants could impact analytics. Today, almost everybody in FP&A receives countless calls asking for information like, "What was our revenue in Q3 last year for this product? What has our growth been over the last three years for this line of business?"

Often, the phrase "digital health" conjures images of smart watches or apps that process your health data to give a readout of a parameter like heart rate. That is part of digital health, to be sure, but at the Big Data in Precision Health conference last week, four speakers during the last session of the conference offered a much more expansive vision for digital health technologies. They discussed robotics, precision mental health and personal behaviors in health practices -- the ever-elusive key to actually making changes in your own health. "Despite the mass amounts of data that we have today, we've still yet to understand how to change [health] behavior," said Jennifer Schneider, MD, the chief medical officer at Livongo, a company that develops products tailored to individuals with chronic diseases, such as devices that monitor blood sugar and provide personalized reminders to people with diabetes. But in areas such as mental health, it's not always easy to know what actions to take, even if you are motivated.

Machines have become deft at exploiting rules and seeking the greatest possible rewards in surprising and creative ways. Facebook's AI once created its own language to make arguing with itself easier and another AI found a way to cheat at Q-bert which had eluded humans for decades. Yet, most of these tales of the wild and weird ways AI finds to approach a problem have gone unpublished until now. They're usually shared from one researcher to another as amusing anecdotes, just something weird that happened while training the latest neural networks. But one research team decided there was value in such tales beyond just entertainment.

It is no coincidence that Bill McDermott, CEO of German software colossus SAP, was invited by the government of Dubai to be a keynote speaker at the World Government Summit. McDermott will share the podium with world leaders, the president of the World Bank, the managing director of the IMF, the quantum physicist/futurist Dr Michio Kaku and the Oxford philosopher Dr Nick Bostrom. Digital transformation is happening in real-time in the UAE, as well as in advanced societies all over the world. Artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, big data, quantum computing and the Internet of Things will literally rewrite the future of humankind in code and revolutionise the roles of government, business and human communications. I was at a recent meeting with the CEO of a prominent Arab bank who told me that smartphone technologies will force him to slash a third of his branch network.

Being a business leader in the established economy is not necessarily a fun job these days. Keeping the competitors at a distance while finding ways to defend the current business model against the Internet giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. is a tough job. However, running a business based on digital disciplines and being prepared with the right armor is simply about doing rather than thinking about the why. As a supporting element, a modern business strategy is built upon a magic triangle that consists of three vertices delivering the necessary essentials: Be digital. In this article, we are going to unfold this triangle.

Being a business leader in the established economy is not necessarily a fun job these days. Keeping the competitors at a distance while finding ways to defend the current business model against the Internet giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. is a tough job. However, running a business based on digital disciplines and being prepared with the right armor is simply about doing rather than thinking about the why. As a supporting element, a modern business strategy is built upon a magic triangle that consists of three vertices delivering the necessary essentials: Be digital. In this article, we are going to unfold this triangle.