In A Decade of Digital Transformation in 12 Months, 46 C-suite executives spoke with PYMNTS for its Q2 eBook on what the world will look like as recovery rolls on and the next iteration of normal rolls out. In this excerpt, Aron Schwarzkopf, CEO of Kushki, predicts that in the next decade, the convergence of AI and blockchain technology will allow firms to rapidly migrate, and to conduct business digitally and across borders with minimal trust concerns.
Read the entire eBook here.
It’s hard to imagine a more exciting time in history to install exponential technologies into the fiber of global society than in the years right ahead of us.
The events of the past year have forced people to drastically change their consumer behavior at a speed that business leaders have never dreamed of. As many experts worldwide debate on topics such as remote work and urban planning, my sole focus is to dematerialize trust.
I think that one of the longest-lasting side effects of a world solely interacting through computers during the pandemic is that it obliged people to disassociate the historical physical constraint of trusting something or someone.
My grandmother, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, wouldn’t buy something online – she wouldn’t even bank online; she didn’t trust it. Since the lockdown, she even trusts to seek and pay for medical advice through her phone – and she’s practically as tech-savvy as a millennial when it comes to shopping online.
That said, a paramount obstacle to accelerating a borderless digital economy has been trust. Am I going to get what I paid for? Who is the person on the other side? In which country/currency will it be fulfilled? Is this reliable? Will I get a return on my investment? When will this be settled?
Enter blockchain in an era of artificial intelligence (AI).
If I had to pick a word that has defined blockchain technology in the past decade, it would be deceptive. As with many great technological revolutions in the past, the first chapter tends to be confusing, misunderstood and almost certainly accompanied by a financial bubble. So much so, that lately we tend to disregard the main contribution of blockchain technology: digitizing trust.
Many of us in the industry tend to forget that eCommerce and eServices today still represent a marginal fraction of total global commerce. More importantly, nine out of 10 businesses worldwide are not ready, or are still in their early stages, of joining the digital economy. We are still in version 1.
Trust has become a central issue that slows down a business’ ability to fulfill demand digitally. Up until now, most of the world’s commerce infrastructure – including user databases, supply chain and banking platforms – have been built independently from each other and have been completely unstandardized. This has caused significant inefficiencies when businesses want to go digital quickly, because each of the platforms required to conduct business online needs to “trust” the other platforms to make a sale happen. The convergence of AI and blockchain technology will fix this in the next decade, and will allow firms to rapidly migrate, and to conduct business digitally and across borders with minimal trust concerns.
Imagine knowing the identity and reputation of all your stakeholders, and never having to worry about their fulfillment or payment capabilities — that will happen soon.
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