KOCHI: Transportation as a service will play a key role in the next five to 10 years and technological advancement in transportation will be driven by customer-centric needs and technologies have to be designed in a way that satisfy individualised user experience and safety, said experts who spoke at the session on ‘The Digital Future of Travel and Travel and Transportation’ organised as part of the #Future, the two-day global digital summit which began in Kochi on Thursday.
Panellists who spoke at the session touched upon topics from futuristic driverless cars to space automated flights and space transport.Christoph Mueller, chief digital and innovation officer - Emirates Group, said mobile devices would be replaced by the voice in next 10 years. We will also have completely new customer segments with 30 per cent of passengers being seniors who have retired with good incomes and are travelling the world; commuter profiles will change and global migrants and a middle-class with massive purchasing power will drive the technology,” he noted.
“Hyper-personalisation will be the new industry requirement as well as delivering on promises, latest standards for user experience design, automated operations and enhanced safety. Technology is only the enabler, the consumer is the one driving the change,” Mueller added. Roland Schuetz, Group CIO – Lufthansa Group, who said ease of use is the new loyalty, is of the opinion travel has to be as easy as possible and seamless, and technology may function behind the scenes.
“It has to be such that travellers do not need to do the planning on their own; they must feel that everything has been taken care of,” he said. According to Schuetz, cyber security is a field which will see exponential growth and employment opportunities.V K Mathews, member of the High Power IT Committee (HPIC) said disintermediation, personalisation, virtualisation and trust quotient will be the four mega trends in future. Disintermediation allows companies take products directly to the consumer while personalisation makes it easier to buy, virtualisation gives them everything they want on a single platform and trust quotient focus on integrity and safe usage for the customer’’ Mathews elaborated.
Antony Satyadas, CEO and Managing Partner - Innovation Incubator, said customers were looking for simplicity and immersive experience and for the startups the efforts should be to provide a cognitive fabric to their technology, mobility capability, insights on massive amounts of data and create conversation interfaces using artificial intelligence’’
On the challenges ahead for the industry, Satyadas said the industry was constantly looking for a testing environment, and for a state like Kerala it presents a big opportunity if the government can leverage this by positioning itself as a technology knowledge hub. Natesh Manikoth, chief data officer of US Federal Aviation Administration, is foreseeing new entrants into the market and substantial investments in products such as drones, vertical take-off and landing systems, unmanned vehicles and commercial space launches.
Referring to autonomous vehicles he said the transformation had to be careful. “Safety and life are paramount. Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning and big data have a role to play in safety analysis in the future,” he said. According to Naresh, there has to be a completely new way of thinking about certification.”Swati Khandelwal was the moderator of the discussion.