Firms harnessing digital tech to grow can raise market cap

Vantage point: Insights from cutting-edge research

Companies that leverage the right combination of new technology could increase their market capitalisation by an average of more than US$6 billion, according to Accenture’s evaluation of 10 digital technologies across eight industries. Accenture carried out the economic modelling after its initial research revealed only 13 per cent of executives at 900-plus big companies said their businesses were getting greater efficiency and business growth through new revenue streams from investments in digital technologies. Accenture believes this is due largely to piecemeal deployment/implementation of digital technology investments.

For the economic modelling, Accenture examined a range of technological combinations that could best help firms with sales revenues of $1 billion or more in automotive, chemicals, consumer goods and services, electronic and high-tech, energy, life sciences and utilities industries significantly cut cost per employee and grow their market capitalisation.

While they vary across industries, the combinations of the technologies — including 3D printing, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), autonomous robots, autonomous vehicles, big data analytics, blockchain, digital twin, machine learning and mobile computing — can have a big impact. For instance, firms in the industrial-equipment sector could additionally save costs of over $43,000 per employee if they combined robotics, AI, blockchain, big data and 3D-printing technologies. Energy firms could gain more than $16 billion in market capitalisation if they combined technologies such as virtual reality, big data and AI. “More than just transforming into digital businesses, companies must reinvent their operating models, production and value chains to create more value with digital,” said Aidan Quilligan, MD and lead for Accenture’s Industry X.0 practice.

Ad fraud to cost advertisers $19 billion in 2018

A new report from Juniper Research has found that advertisers will lose an estimated $19 billion to fraudulent activities next year, equivalent to $51 million per day. This figure, representing advertising on online and mobile devices, will continue to rise, reaching $44 billion by 2022. Juniper’s new research, “Future Digital Advertising — AI, Ad Fraud & Ad Blocking 2017-2022”, claimed that the “walled garden”, a closed platform approach whereby advertising platforms restrict the flow of advertising performance data to advertisers and publishers, must be abandoned to stimulate transparency between stakeholders. The report found that advertising fraud rates will continue to increase as a result of this, further hindering stakeholder efforts in tackling fraud.

 

Additionally, the research predicted that AI will be crucial in analysing the vast amounts of data generated from advertising activities daily and minimising loss due to fraud. It predicted that fraudsters will increasingly innovate in their approaches to imitate genuine advertising activity including simulated clicks, mouse movements and social network accounts. “Fraudsters will continue to heavily invest in domains, user accounts and bot farms in order to appear genuine,” argued research author Sam Barker. “Advertising stakeholders will demand constant vigilance against the threat of ad fraud, which will only be achieved through the correct implementation of AI services.”

The research predicted that platforms leveraging AI for targeting purposes will account for 74 per cent of the total online and mobile advertising spend by 2022. However, as the adoption of AI becomes saturated, only platforms demonstrating the most effective algorithms will be able to charge premium prices to advertisers.