From Industry 4.0 to Predictive Enterprises 
What Your Company Will Look Like In a Faster than Real-time Future

Are you still talking about Industry 4.0? Europe's most prominent researcher of the future, Sven Gábor Jánszky, uses this term only reluctantly today. He believes that we set ourselves up for misunderstandings when we speak of Industry 4.0. In his vision of the future, the result of digitalisation will not be the often mentioned automation of factories as promised by Industry 4.0. Instead, Sven Gábor Jánszky forecasts "Predictive Enterprises".

And he goes even further: Jánszky predicts that all companies - across all sectors - will become "predictive enterprises" by 2025. Whether we like it or not, all of our companies will be caught up in a wave of changes happening so quickly that it will strike fear in many of us. This is a result of the exponential speed of the computer industry and the doubling of computers' processing powers every 18 months. What does this mean? It is, in fact, a difficult concept for most people to comprehend because we cannot think exponentially.
To help, Sven Gábor Jánszky likes to conduct a small thought experiment with his audience: the parable of the chessboard and the grains of wheat. Imagine a typical chessboard: 8 x 8, or, 64 squares. If you lay one grain of wheat in the first square, double this in the next and so on to the last square ... how many grains of wheat will you have in the 64th square? An unimaginable 9 trillion! That much wheat would cover half of the Earth's surface. Now, you probably can't relate directly to grains of wheat, but imagine that your company's computers were to replace the wheat on the chessboard.

Put the world's first transistor computer from 1953 on the first square and today's computer systems in square 42. Now imagine your AI-powered digital assistants from 2025 on the 47th square. This example shows that today's computers are 2,199,023,255,552 times faster than the first. Your digital assistant from 2030 will be 1,125,899,906,842,624 times more powerful! Have you already made this increase, from 2.2 trillion to 1.1 quadrillion, the basis for your company strategy?

If not, you should invite Sven Gábor Jánszky to speak with you. He describes, clearly and concisely, the strategic consequences for companies: they will become predictive enterprises with adaptive products, predictive company software and business models that need to be "faster than real-time". The predictive enterprises of the future will work using intelligent, predictive operating systems. They will make forecasts of the near future and use these to steer our business processes more efficiently.

And the best part of this lecture is its style. Sven Gábor Jánszky doesn't bore you with the usual bullet points used by other researchers. He presents the future of your company in a humorous and fascinating tour through that very future. If you would like, he can present your guests with a live experiment demonstrating the future of computer technology. He will show you how computers, even today, can be controlled purely by thought.