As seasoned practitioners developing innovation in Business Information Technology, you could say that the team at acumen.zone have experienced a few innovations and trends.

Things we take for granted today such as the advent of mobile phones and the introduction of fiber networks and cloud computing were at the leading edge of innovation not that long ago.

And, innovation just keeps coming, but the speed and impact of innovation have accelerated dramatically in recent years, as has the speed of adoption.

Consider that it took the new social media platform “Threads” only seven hours to gain 10 million users compared to 40 days for ChatGPT3, 270 days for TikTok and 355 days for Instagram.

You may think this is irrelevant to your business – but think about Microsoft Teams, which grew just under 900% worldwide during the pandemic, and is now used by more than 1 million organisations.

All these recent technologies can be exciting and empowering, yet they are also disruptive, scary, and can be tricky to wrangle into a business to get the most out of them.

AI challenges

In a recent KPMG study, half of the surveyed business leaders in the industrial manufacturing, retail, and tech sectors believed that AI is moving faster than it should be in their industries.

This is causing challenges such as:

• Disruption – Understanding and adopting innovative technology takes time.
• Challenges in keeping pace – Without significant investment and focus, it is almost impossible to keep pace with AI innovations.
• Concentration – Only a few people in a business can afford the time to learn and assimilate innovative technologies.
• Resources and investment – People and money must be spent to acquire new skills and capabilities.
• Skills gaps and workforce challenges – A growing problem is the lack of skilled workers available to employ and insufficient capacity to grow your own skills internally.

This acceleration of change has made the modern business environment volatile and complex, and adds pressure to internal IT teams who have to keep the engines running while everyone is reinventing the wheel.

We at acumen.zone often see in-company IT teams that are already overwhelmed by operational expectations being allocated research and development tasks that they would love to do, but simply don’t have the skills or capacity to accomplish.

These IT teams find it impossible to make progress towards strategic deadlines when they get called away to urgent operational crisis management – and because of this, the CEO ends up feeling let down.

A combined effect of these pressures is that more and more businesses are starting to realize the benefits of corporate innovation outside of their operational IT environment.

The principle idea is this:
Let the innovators innovate,
and the operators operate.

acumen.zone

Innovation is a niche in which we thrive. Acumen works best with innovative leaders to build groundbreaking systems that scale easily and help businesses to scale as well.

We have more than two decades of experience focusing on developing enterprise-grade, scalable solutions that operate in mission-critical environments.

During this time, we have fine-tuned our development operations and gathered a team of experts to deliver strategically important projects that will always beat the competition.

Our approach ensures that the business systems we build are future-proofed and also that they don’t break under the stress of success. I.e. they can grow and scale rapidly.

Then, when these solutions are ready, we hand them over to our clients’ internal systems teams to run their operations at full speed.

Our Customer Successes Evolve

Throughout its two decades of experience, we have been part of many exciting customer success stories.

For example: we helped a manufacturing firm move its finance, operations, and CRM to the cloud before it acquired most of its competitors and consolidated an entire industry into its cloud installation.

We also helped a point-of-sale business that dominates an entire mid-tier of retailers with omnichannel shopping alternatives, and a medical insurance company that moved its quoting and sales systems into the cloud to make its entire sales workforce significantly more efficient.

We even supported a nano-technology company that started from nothing to become a leader in its field.

In the Agri-tech space, we helped two young men, fresh out of varsity, that are now on their way to leading their successful start-up onto the global stage.

None of these projects included AI at the time, but they all use it in some form or fashion today.

Over half of the products that we are developing at the moment have large language models (LLM) baked into their architecture in ways that make them exponentially more capable than they would have been without AI.

If you’d rather be the AI-powered hunter than be the hunted, give us a call, or book an online discovery meeting with me.

This article was written by Mark Morris, the Technology Product Development & Cloud Services specialist at acumen.zone, with some help from AI