The past few years will go down in history as the time when the normal turned entirely upside down in a matter of weeks. As the pandemic swept around the globe, governments and businesses were caught unprepared, and many of them took a massive hit on their bottom line and credibility. Inertia differed across companies and industries, and some were slow to come to grips with the new business reality. The pandemic highlighted the need for businesses to stay swift and nimble in today's competitive landscape. Digital investments were again an essential element of business strategy to remain resilient and recover.

Japan's debt-strapped government unveiled a budgeting mechanism to try to minimize the financial burden of new green and other growth initiatives by tying funding to cost-cutting results at its ministries. Under the plan, ministries get ¥3 to spend on projects in targeted areas including the environment and digitalization for every yen they're able to cut from other spending, according to documents released by the Cabinet Office Wednesday. The plan calls for cuts of 10% to discretionary spending, which totaled ¥14.9 trillion ($135 billion) last year across the country's ministries. Cuts to non-discretionary spending are also part of the plan. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is pushing for investment into green and digital technologies even as the government struggles under the developed world's heaviest debt burden.

Supply chain disruption during the global pandemic offers chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) a prime opportunity to get leadership backing for supply chain digital transformation. Gartner research shows that the pandemic has only increased the urgency for digitalization. Many CEOs expect to accelerate digital initiatives, and the vast majority of CSCOs intend to dramatically speed up their supply chain digital maturity progress over the next five years. CSCOs must build a sound business case to support their digital vision's business value "Supply chain leaders should take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime chance to raise the profile of the supply chain function and develop supply chain capabilities to support business priorities," says Pierfrancesco Manenti, VP Analyst, Gartner. "But CSCOs must build a sound business case to support their digital vision's business value and priority alignment."

There is a fresh wave of disruption post COVID-19. Banks and financial institutions are adapting digital transformation at a blazing pace, this is a good and a progressive sign for us as this opens doors to the much awaited advancements in the financial sector. Lets just say – now the digital revolution has truly begun. The COVID-19 crisis has triggered customers to adopt digital interaction across segments. Nowadays branch loving customers are also using digital platforms to interact with their banks or NBFCs (Non-Banking Financial Companies) – this routine may become a trend in the future.

With the ongoing spread of Covid-19, video conferencing, risk management, cloud services and digital transformation have drawn corporate interest for investment, says Accenture, a business consultancy. "We see no evidence that our customers, particularly in banking and retail, are putting less emphasis on technology or digital transformation projects," said Nontawat Poomchusri, managing director of Accenture in Thailand. During this crisis, businesses attach more importance to digital technology, which will be increasingly adopted, he said. Collaboration tools and video conference meetings should be more common for work as they reduce travel and facilitate working from home, said Mr Nontawat. Business continuity planning and risk management should become priorities, he said.

Without strategy, AI tools won't make an impact. Most organizations would find it hard to operate without the technology they have today, and more are planning to invest larger sums to keep up in the digital marathon. This year alone, worldwide spending on digital transformation is predicted by International Data Corporation (IDC) to reach US$1.18 trillion, and the figure doubles to US$2.3 trillion by 2023. The significant investment represents a drive for companies, from startups to major government departments and national organizations, to integrate technology to streamline organizational workflow. Although the motivation to adopt digital transformation is prevalent in the majority of organizations, a lack of business impact from artificial intelligence (AI) is driving morale down in organizations. A survey by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group, which consulted more than 2,500 executives, showed that 70 percent of organizations are experiencing minimal or no business impact from AI.

Doctors Are Confident That AI Won't Replace ThemGetty Companies such as DeepMind and IBM have been at the forefront of introducing AI into healthcare, with their smart algorithms proving adept at finding patterns in large quantities of data that enable the machines to make accurate predictions in the diagnosis of a range of conditions. There have been projects to provide more accurate and earlier diagnoses for mental health, dementia, Parkinson's, skin cancer, Alzheimer's, arthritis and, well, you get the picture. The reporting of many of these projects has been accompanied by breathless claims that doctors work will soon be automated, with these claims seeming to be supported by the growing number of AI-based triage systems on the market that claim to be able to accurately diagnose patients after hearing of their various symptoms. One might imagine that given this technological onslaught, doctors are a bit edgy about their long-term prospects, but that doesn't appear to be the case at all. Indeed, a recent study set out to ask doctors operating in primary care across the United Kingdom how they felt about AI technologies and whether they believed their job was at risk, and the answer was an overwhelming no.

Looking back at the last decade of digital transformation – the use of technology to radically improve performance or change the enterprise – the one constant has been an ongoing shift in focus and priorities. Looking forward to 2019, a number of trends are emerging that IT leaders will want to consider as they make their plans for the new year. Are you on the same page as your peers? This year, many digital projects suddenly matured from experimentation to enterprise implementation. In the year ahead, business leaders are likely to scrutinize their digital investments more closely.

If there's one thing a digital strategy can't be, it's incremental. The mismatch between most incumbents' business models and digital futures is too great--and the environment is changing too quickly--for anything but bold, inventive strategic plans to work. Unfortunately, most strategic-planning exercises dogenerate incrementalism. We know this from experience and from McKinsey research: on average, resources don't move between business units in large organizations. A recent book by our colleagues, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick, seeks to explain what causes this inertia (strategy's social side, rooted in individual interests, group dynamics, and cognitive biases) and to suggest a way out (understanding the real odds of strategy and overhauling your planning processes to deliver the big moves that can overcome those long odds). All this holds doubly true for digital strategy, which demands special attention.

To be a digital lender, banks and credit unions must do more than provide a digital app. Internal lending processes must be transformed to eliminate friction and unneeded steps, with artificial intelligence (AI) supporting proactive loan decisions. A great deal of discussion has surrounded the importance of building a seamless digital account opening process. As found in the Digital Banking Report, Digital Account Opening and Onboarding, progress is beginning to be made, as more organizations are allowing consumers to open new checking accounts online and on a mobile device. With the exception of a very few progressive banks and forward-thinking fintech firms, however, not nearly as much progress has been made in digital lending.