Machines and human beings need to cooperate to deliver the fourth Industrial Revolution (iIoT) in history, which is five years away according to Ray Eitel-Porter, MD for big data and analytics at Accenture UK & Ireland.
Addressing Interop London last week, Eitel-Porter said: "One thing we see rapidly increasing is the need for people to work together with machines."
Nicknamed by the company as "workforce reimagined", workers of tomorrow will see an increase in the need of teaming with others.
He added: "Teaming is going to come in two different forms: humans with humans, and humans and machine teaming."
The MD told experts in the audience that in the space of 16 years, 52% of companies in the Fortune 500 have changed. In contrast, past companies used to feature in the Fortune 500 for an average of 60 years, according to Eitel-Porter.
He said: "To stay at the top they need to fight much harder than it used to be needed.
"We really like to focus on the outcomes. If we focus on what we want to achieve and then take the actions coming from the back to the beginning."
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Companies, which typically would think in the following order – issues, data, analytics, insights, actions and outcomes, were advised to start by the outcomes.
Eitel-Porter added that more than 90% of high performing companies are satisfied with the contribution analytics has made to financial performance, strategy direction, managing risk, addressing growth opportunities and informing critical decisions.
Unicorns easier to find than data scientists
The need of a wide set of skills concentrated in one individual makes it difficult for enterprises to find data scientists, according to Eitel-Porter.
The MD highlighted that "data teams are important because individuals will lack the full skill-set of a data scientist, as a group, they can possess them all".
For Eitel-Porter, a data scientist should be someone that possesses advanced analytics, business acumen and communication and collaboration skills.
They also need to be creative, understand data integration, data visualisation, software development and system administration.
And it is those set of skills that "makes it easier to find a unicorn that a data scientist."
He said: "In one digital minute, 2.4 billion people connect and interact, meaning that that connection needs to be captured, analysed and understood."
Accenture estimates that by 2020 there will be 50 billion devices connected to the internet adding 200 billion sensors.
The company predicts connected and intelligent products to be the biggest internet ‘user group’ with 24 billion devices by then.
