Fjord Trends 2020: Emerging Trends in Business | Accenture

Introduction
Every year, Fjord–AccentureInteractive’s design and innovation practice–crowdsources
trends for the year ahead from its network of 1,200 people in 33 studios worldwide. It’s
always a labor of love, plenty of Post-it Notes and coffee, and mainly, lots of healthy debate
and laughs.
With new studios opening in Japan and across Latin America, Fjord Trends 2020 are our most
globally diverse to date. Even with the diversity of regional flavors and context, there was a
high level of consensus in our initial idea-gathering stage.
As a result, these are our most closely connected trends ever, telling a comprehensive story
about our landscape and what to expect in business, technology and design in the year
ahead.

“90 percent of boardrooms believe that their
organizations must have a clear social purpose to
contribute to society, beyond maximizing returns to
shareholders.”
Lloyds Financial Institutions sentiment survey, November 2019

It’s time to realign the
fundamentals
2020’s meta-trend is nothing short of a major realignment of
the fundamentals. It’s tempting to misinterpret this as a
gloomy picture–instead, we think this is a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity
to innovate in business models, services and products around
new definitions of value.
However it plays out from here, one thing is likely: those who
embrace the long-term view–by starting with their impact on
the world and society, and embracing the systemic complexity
of the world–
will emerge as winners.

Many faces of growth
Money changers
Walking barcodes
Liquid people
Designing intelligence
Digital doubles
Life-centered design

Corporate transformationwill soon switch focus from
digital to purpose, in response to people’s demand for
success metrics that enhance our lives–alongside
financial growth.

What’s next
• A re-examination of long-held beliefs, stemming from
changing societal values, concerns about finite natural
resources, and economic and political instability.
• Innovation in meaning and metrics. New definitions
might include personal growth, such as learning,
happiness,communal longevity or good health.
Economic models will evolve and organizations will
need to upskill staff at all levels.
• For organizations,the challenge will lie in resolving the
tension between finding more purposefulbusiness
objectives without
losing sight of the fact that profit is essential for
longevity.

Think Say Do
Fjordsuggests
How will you define new types of
value you can deliver while making
the profit required to thrive?
And how will Customer Experience
and Employee Experience work
together to create that value at the
points of creation and delivery?
Ask your employees what sort of
growth they’d like to see in the
organization. Get the debate going.
What you measure counts.
Start to embed new metrics
(alongside financial growth) to drive
behaviors.
Collaborate with the willing to make
change happen at an industrial level,
as effective change is easier to sign up
to if many join the game.
How are you set up for different value
to be rewarded? How do you
motivate people?
Reimagine how you define and measure growth for
different stakeholders.

Our experience of what money is and what it can
do is changing, opening the door for a host of
pioneering products and services as money carries
other information with it, and represents multiple
forms of value.

What’s next
• Our mental model of money as something physical will be
replaced by money as traceable, programmable file transfers.
• New payment experiences will be used as a point of
differentiation and disruption.
• As it becomes easier for companies to play a financial role in
their customers’ lives, trust will be key and it will have to be
built through quality of experience, while robustly addressing
concerns about privacy, transparency and integrity.
• Smart devices can already learn to identify their users for
authenticationwith minimal effort. Next, we’ll see a
significant rise in the use of “biometric mobile wallets”–
payment by fingerprint, facial or retina recognition.

Think Say Do
Fjordsuggests
If your service were a part of
money transactions, what would it
look like? For example, if every
payment carried information about
you or your customers, what would
that be? How useful could you
make it?
How will the changing landscape of
money affect your business and
customers?
Communicate why people can trust
your organization. Highlight your
customers' trust as an asset you
can extend to new financial
offerings.
Move to where people are going to
manage money and build on
services they already use (i.e.
technology like SMS or services like
neobanks).
Follow these closely and look for
new product opportunitiesaround
people’s money goals.
Reimagine transaction and payment as a source of innovation and
competitive advantage.

Interfaces are dissolving, and we’re finding new
ways for technology to identify both us and
features of our behavior. 5G’s impact will extend
beyond faster data connection to enable new
physical experiences, made possible by facial and
body language recognition.

What’s next
• The Internet of Bodies will be added to the Internet of
Things.
• Living services will move from the digital world into the
physical one. We will start designing for dissolving
interfaces, 5G-enabled space personalization
and machine-to-machine communication.
• Designers will need to learn from the data mistakes
made in digital, and ensure that the invisible data
transaction is an exchange that offers people tangible
value.
• Organizations will need to understand how to design
opt-out in the real world, how to ethically shape
people’s behaviors, and any associated concerns and
constraints.

Think Say Do
Fjordsuggests
Which of your services could be
unlocked by biometrics, (in line with
regulations and laws in your sector, of
course)? What could you do with facial
recognition or understanding body
language to reduce friction for people?
Then look at the human experience of
these services:
Who do they most convenience? How
do people consent? How could
improved communications between
machines, via 5G, create new service
opportunities?
Advocate for data minimalism and
educate your customers about data
consent and privacy–the consequences
of data breach in biometrics are much
more severe.
Make the invisible visible so people
understand when a
scan, transaction or consent
has taken place.
Ensure that people can be the curators
of their own personalized experiences–
build a platform for people to express,
discover, and receive what they want.
Reimagine new services for dissolving interfaces, enabled by 5G.

What does it mean in 2020 to be a "consumer" or an
"employee"?
We increasingly need to support individual customers’ and
employees’ changeable desires and pursuit of greater
meaning in their lives.

What’s next
• It’s unclear which markets this trend will most affect and
when, but personal purpose-seeking is on the rise.
• We expect to hear more about ethical anxiety
as we navigate trade-offs between competing ethical
demands and our own wants
and desires.
• This is not a generational shift. A preference
for products, services and work with personal purpose
will be just as likely from people in
their sixties and seventies as by teens or the middle-
aged. This is a rapidly growing
market opportunity.
• We will need to link customer and employee experience
much more closely than ever before.

Think Say Do
Fjordsuggests
How does your brand enable
people to define themselves
beyond what they consume, the
work they do or the income they
earn?
How does your business think
about people beyond the boxes of
"customer" or "employee"?
Strike the word "consumer" from
your vocabulary.
Provide people with choices that
allow them to flex and explore
their identity.
Help people navigate anxiety
around ethical choices.
Set up Human Insights
teams instead of Consumer
Insights–focus less on the number
of people that are taking specific
actions,
and more on the context
that surroundstheir
decision-making.
Reimagine your offering for the era of conscious consumerism.

The next step for Artificial Intelligence is a
generation of systems that blend it with human
intelligence to unlock the full potential of people
and machines working together.

What’s next
• Organizations will need new, systematic approaches for
unlocking the full potential of human collaboration with AI.
• Through our work with Accenture’s The Dock, we’ve
identified three key areas:
• Enhancing the human experience by extending our
perceptual capabilities.
• Empowering people in complex systems of global
organizations.
• Envisioning new products and services through
simulation and decision making support.
• AI and people view the world very differently, and if we
harness AI for innovation, we could generate ideas we’d
never dream of ourselves. It’s not a race against machines,
but with machines.

Think Say Do
Fjordsuggests
How can you make AI part of your
strategic decision-making process rather
than just automation of individual tasks?
Where in your processes does human
input add more value, and where is AI
better suited for the job? What human
qualities will you intentionally design
into your AI colleague?
How will you effectively manage the
interface and handover between
humans and machine?
Talk about AI in simple terms according
to what it can do–see, hear,
recommend–rather than technical
descriptions, like "computer vision".
Trust AI data to help you in
your decision-making and
mock-up your AI first before heavily
investing in it–barriers to entry for AI
prototypes has dropped dramatically,
thanks to online platforms.
Reimagine how to design AI for the human intelligence around it to step to
the next level of value creation.

Brands will need to learn how to interact with our digital
doubles–virtual home for all our data, and gatekeepers of our
digital lives. So will we.

What’s next
• By looking like us, digital doubles could rewrite the data
ownership model. By doing all the work with companies and
serving back to the user the best solutions for them, they
begin to become the gatekeepers of our digital lives.
• The critical considerationfor every person will be: who do I
trust to host my digital double?
• A critical consideration for organizationswill be: how can we
design and build trust and safety into our offering to give
people the confidence to choose us as their host?
• Any digital double experience must be engaging, transparent
and easy to access. Interface and interactions must match the
user's mental model–and be simple and clear. Visualizationwill
be a central challenge.

Think Say Do
Fjordsuggests
What category of interactions
could be opened up by digital
doubles?
Shape your strategy with digital
doubles around three use cases:
• Delegating tasks for you.
• Masquerading your presence.
• Modeling your behavior or
future.
Make it clear to people that they
have control of their data–not you–
and demonstrate that your
platform can be trusted to win
customers and employees.
Ensure data reliability, but make
sure you're not overly reliant on
the data–alwaysinclude the "lived
reality".
Avoid falling into the gamification
trap but do
play and experiment, as
this is a new realm with properties
which are as
yet undetermined.
Reimagine the representation of people.

If it's true that organizations are working to define
new forms of growth and that people are moving
away from defining themselves simply by the items
they buy or the work they do, how should design
respond?

What’s next
• Those producing physical goods will have to change often
complex supply chain and manufacturing processes in time
to meet customers’ demand for purposefulproducts and
services that make a positive impact.
• Those in digital must replace their business model of
constant engagement and self-service with alternatives that
reinstate the interpersonal connections,attention and time
that people want.
• Design needs to adjust. Designers must broaden their
understandingto look at entire systems
as they increasingly design to meet the needs
of personal and collective values. New tools
will emerge.

Think Say Do
Fjordsuggests
Redefine desirability, feasibility,
viability in
your work.
How can your offering become
regenerative by design, including
deleted items that disappear from
view?
How can you use design as a central
tool for creating alignment around
change, and the purpose of
innovation?
Show that you consider natural,
political and societal ecosystems as
equals– practice "do no harm" in
all areas rather than paying
lip service.
Demonstrate that
life-centered design is your new
norm, and not just
a project.
Update your design skillset with
systems thinking.
Collaborate with other disciplines,
such as scientists, technologists
and futurists, and actively design in
systems that encourage people to
reduce their use of resources.
Reimagine the role of design in 2020.

Further reading
Read the Fjord Trends 2020 on
Accenture.com/Fjordtrends2020
For a deeper dive visit
trends.fjordnet.com
To find out more about realigning fundamentals for your
organization, contact fjord.trends@accenture.com

Fjord Trends 2020: Emerging Trends in Business | Accenture

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