By 2030, the world will be entering the 6G era; an intelligently autonomous, sensory, massively distributed but highly networked world that blends our physical, digital and human systems. Data will be created on an unimaginable scale, changing how we collaborate, convene, create and contextualize.
In this future, as a shipping container traverses geographies and connectivity environments, supply chain participants will have real-time, granular visibility. This is made possible through a constellation of integrated technologies, including terrestrial, private and public 5G, distributed cloud, and non-terrestrial space networks – which we collectively call 5G+. They will not only be able to precisely track assets, but also adjust and act upon real time intelligence. This will enable rerouting to skirt a hurricane or piracy crisis, or collecting emissions data to feed a machine learning model that produces climate-friendly shipping routes.
Industries will be able to swiftly react to volatility, substituting raw materials to mitigate a geopolitically stoked commodity price spike, for instance. At their most advanced, such recalibrations will be powered by a hyper-connected network constellation capable of federating data across a trusted networked fabric.
This is the future we at EY call “pervasive intelligence,” an era of human-industrial augmentation in which an integrated connectivity and compute fabric allows unprecedented volumes of data to be generated, shared, accessed and acted upon beyond the walls of individual enterprises, sectors and geographies.
To harness the power of pervasive intelligence and prepare for the future, leaders need to act now to optimize value from the 5G+ platform. To do this, they will need to adopt new business models and use cases and build the right tech architectures with ecosystem partners. As a multi-year journey, the efforts to utilize pervasive intelligence will mean putting people at the heart of the transformation plan.
In this article we explore the following key topics:
- Chapter 1: What is pervasive intelligence?
- Chapter 2: An intelligent start: realizing the promise of 5G+
- Chapter 3: The road to pervasive intelligence
- Chapter 4: Key actions for industry leaders