Back in 2019, who could possibly have predicted just how tumultuous the early 2020s would be for digital transformation? When the pandemic hit, an urgent acceleration of digital transformation initiatives followed. Companies of all sizes, across a broad range of industries, were forced to invest in advanced, collaborative technologies in an effort to adapt to the new normal. Covid was certainly a shock to the system for those organisations that had not previously invested heavily in digital. However, it helped many to establish a solid foundation to begin building towards a brighter future, driven by technology.

The year 2020 was unforgettable in many ways. It was a year of incredible stories of courage, optimism, but there were some sad ones too. While it challenged us in many ways, it also taught us the value of freedom and the importance of being digitally advanced. From startups to conglomerates, COVID-19 wreaked havoc on all types of businesses and industries. The only difference was in the impact.

The year 2020 will go down as the period when organizations responded to new risks, pivoted to new business models and accelerated their digital transformation programs in an effort to weather a lethal pandemic. In the 2020 COVID-19 epoch, going digital was no longer a business luxury but a matter of survival. Digital transformation was crucial to enabling remote working, transitioning to collaboration workflows, and to realigning operations from supply chain management through customer experiences. CIO and IT leaders no longer have to sell the business on how critical technology is to all aspects of operations. In 2020, the question was how fast could IT partner with business leaders to deliver collaboration, workflow and analytics capabilities in the cloud.

The new decade of 2020 or the next stage of "digital evolution" welcomes the world with a promise of hyper intuitive cognitive capabilities and emotionally intelligent interfaces that will rebuild businesses in numerous unpredictable ways. As the tech community (for invested implementation) prepares itself for the new age of disruptive changes to arrive at it's matured stage, it becomes wise and necessary to have a look at these digital transformation trends. Conversational Artificial Intelligence- Siri and Google Assistant are always at swords for their accuracy in answers, but still they both lack in understanding the right intent. Applied conversational AI, fixes this disconnects as it understands the relevance and personalization within humans for successful computer interaction. Conversational AI has an automated speech recognition program that understands natural language and forms a response that exhibits a customized dialogue.

Cultural adaptation is the step zero of digital transformation. Encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit by dedicating internal groups to find digital solutions has become the new normal for financial institutions. Banks are striving to become technology companies by automating back office work flows and increasing customer satisfaction with low friction interfaces and lower cost services. Incumbent intrepreneurs look to transformation trends that will keep banks future proofed while challengers and tech giants move in on a fintech market where banks have lost a quarter of the payments franchise to new players. Data has fuelled the growth of fintech with open banking starting to take a lead role in developing game changers such as AI and cloud.