Industry 4.0 bring about the convergence of digital to all aspects of human life. Digital adoption will not be a topic of concern for the startups of the future since digital will be embedded. In an age of automation, artificial intelligence and robotics the competitive edge of any organisation will be the collective abilities of its human assets. This digital age demands a skill set of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving.

The current workforce need to adopt such skills sets while the future workforce should adapt and be ready. Can the primary and higher education continue the same methodology of teaching to inculcate such skills? Hence education is looking to creative approaches to bring about this change but does teachers, principal and administrative offices understand the need for change? STEAM, makerspaces, coding in school and entrepreneurial thinking are words being thrown about but what does it all mean? How can we as the startup community spearhead this change?

The first ever TV advertisement was broadcasted in 1941. It was 5 decades later that the internet as we know it now was available for the public to use. Fast forward to 2018, almost every single website now carries advertisements for almost everything that's available for sale.

In 2018, a 30 second NFL Super Bowl advertising costs almost as high at USD 5 million to reach an audience of 100 million people of which many may not be your customer. But on the same budget, you could reach a million people on Facebook who have a better probability of buying your product. So is traditional marketing still relevant? Do TV, Radio and Newspaper advertisements still have any effect on consumers? How does a business find the right balance to spend their marketing budget on? Or should we just place all bets on digital marketing?

The true realisation of connectedness is not achieved by merely being connected but when content is shared among those who are connected either one to one or one to many. This connection is built on trust, which is more a faith that we have on the connected community. The artificially created sense of control in cyberspace which one feels privy to could be just an illusion.

Data has become a commodity which most of the time is acquired for free but sold at a price knowingly or unknowingly to the owner of the date. Enforcing of data privacy laws are feeble in certain economies but does that give us the right to exploit the data of our clients?

Can the startup ecosystem act as the catalyst to bring about a secure connected society? What are the cyber security related laws and initiatives in place to secure a connected society in Sri Lanka and is data actually protected? What is General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its impact to Sri Lankan public and private sector companies?

1. AI usage in business and the potential, (examples such as Facebook M, the text-based virtual assistant that used human workers to train an artificial intelligence system, Chat bots with AI and Google services with AI, etc.)

2. Artificial Intelligence in the areas of Automation and Augmentation

3. What might possibly come in the future (impact it has on job market too) and what sort of supervision and regulations should come in to play.

Alan Turing developed the Turing Test in the 1950’s to test the machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. In 2018, Google did a public demo of Google Duplex, a system they that is being developed in which an AI will make calls to real businesses and get work done without the person on the other side of the call even knowing it was a machine talking to them.

The line between what a machine could do and what a human can do is thinning by the day. While we lose jobs to automation and AI by the day, humans are forced to find creative ways to stay relevant. But what happens when Artificial Intelligence fails? AI Apocalypse?

While all technologies built over the years past has had an alternative, artificial intelligence is a technology that does not yet seem to have an alternative. Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk famously one said “AI will be the best or the worst thing ever for humanity. So let's get it right”. The question now is, how do we get it right?