It's not only AI driving the future, REAL-TIME DATA is becoming huge

Every week The Money Show interviews the author or reviewer of a new or trending business book.

This week, Stephen Grootes talked to regular book reviewer Ian Mann, MD of Gateways Business Consultants.

Mann reviewed Fusion Strategy: How Real-Time Data and AI Will Power the Industrial Future.

Written by world-renowned innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan and digital strategy expert Venkat Venkatraman, Fusion Strategy is described as 'the way forward'.

The authors illustrate the importance for companies of real-time data they collect from clients or users - in the case of tech giants like Amazon and Google, this translates into billions of people.

"What Govindarajan points out is that we're at an inflection point now, and we need to understand how things are going to change."

"What is key, is they talk about how we used to have big industries that were making billions of dollars... but then we've got all the digital light industries now. If we can combine these two things, we can have a projection that is completely different to what we had before."

"If you just think of companies like Netflix or Spotify, what they do is by learning more and more about you they're more easily able to give you more of what you want. It's that combination of taking real-time data in use, as opposed to collected data from one place - Ii's watching humans actually using the data and what they do with it."

"If I google a question about Johannesburg (there are three in the US and one in Suriname), because they know it's me they'll intuit that I'm probably more interested in SA than any other country... and as they do this they get smarter and smarter and through that they have a bigger data base they can call on."

"This book is really a fervent call to get going on getting into this age as fast as you possibly can, so that you're  ahead of your competitors."

"The examples they give are not ones that you're supposed to try and emulate, but just examples that will stimulate thinking that you can use in your own business, no matter what type of business it is."

Ian Mann, MD - Gateways Business Consultants

Description on Amazon:

Tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google can collect real-time data from billions of users. For companies that design and manufacture physical products, that type of fluid, data-rich information used to be a pipe dream. Now, with the rise of cheap and powerful sensors, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence, things are changing―fast.

In Fusion Strategy, world-renowned innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan and digital strategy expert Venkat Venkatraman offer a first-of-its-kind playbook that will help industrial companies combine what they do best―create physical products―with what digitals do best―use algorithms and AI to parse expansive, interconnected datasets―to make strategic connections that would otherwise be impossible.

The laws of competitive advantage are changing, rewarding those who have the most robust, data-driven insights rather than the most valuable assets. To compete in the new digital age, companies need to use real-time data to turbocharge their products, strategies, and customer relationships. Those that don't risk falling on the wrong side of the next great digital divide.

Fusion Strategy is the way forward.

Scroll up to listen to Mann's review