As shapers of the future, millennials are taking leadership roles across the world as activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, and much more.
Disruptive innovation from this demographic often comes from low-key, even crazy ideas. Struggling to make rent in San Francisco, Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky stumbled across his value proposition almost by accident. With co-founder Joe Gebbia, Chesky decided to inflate air mattresses and rent out his apartment to local conference attendees, spawning a company that now lists 1.7 million homes in 34,000 cities worldwide.
Fueled by mobile Internet, the nascent Sharing Economy has inspired new innovative business models. Connection ubiquity coupled with IoT will transform physical things into information units that generate and process data at a local level. A predicted two-thirds of information will be transmitted within one kilometer by 2020.
At the 2015 Huawei Cloud Congress, noted futurist Kevin Kelly stated that the convergence of three AI-driven factors will coalesce the cloud over the next 20 years: data, bandwidth, and intelligence. By 2020, 50 percent of apps will be on clouds, with killer apps centering on IQ and AI. Both IQ and AI will be buyable as basic services, much like electricity is now.
Clouds will repurpose all physical products into services. They will boom because they are cheap, quick, and easy to create, and also unaffected by local markets. Combining AI and traditional services will give rise to a new X + AI model that exists in a more agile and organic world. Efficient, intelligent, and cloud-based will be bywords for how people obtain services, with resources better distributed and scheduled.
Our future selves will spend most of our time on clouds, with AI infusing everything with intelligence. A better connected, smarter, safer, and more efficient life is coming into being.