Ng Wee Wei, Southeast Asia Market Unit Lead and Senior Managing Director at Accenture, highlights the growing rate of change affecting businesses, with technology being a significant source of disruption. The reliance on apps for essential services in Southeast Asia has increased drastically, thanks to generative AI accelerating this transformation.
Wee Wei stresses the importance of continuous reinvention for companies to stay ahead of disruption. The key to success lies in becoming “reinventors”—companies that adopt a strategy of total enterprise reinvention across all aspects of their business. He discourages the transformer approach, where companies settle for piecemeal solutions rather than embracing continuous reinvention.
To achieve total enterprise reinvention, Wee Wei outlines four key steps that businesses should take. First, defining ambition and strategy, followed by enhancing the digital core, investing in talent and skilling, and forming strategic partnerships. Companies must prioritize collaborative decision-making, align their digital core with industry standards, invest in talent with necessary skills for transformation, and build strategic partnerships to accelerate reinvention.
Wee Wei emphasizes the need for companies to develop a talent strategy that outlines changes in work, role impacts, and required skills for transformation. In a gen AI world, learning becomes continuous and integrated into everyday work processes. Accenture has implemented technology quotient training for all employees, executive-specific sessions, and masterclasses to prepare industry executives for the impact of Gen AI.
Strategic partnerships play a crucial role in accelerating transformation and unlocking new value and innovation. By leveraging a network of trusted ecosystem partners, companies can gain unique access to new technologies and industry expertise. Wee Wei cites an example where a company built an ecosystem to drive the 5G economy, collaborating with device manufacturers, innovators, system integrators, and technology companies to develop metaverse infrastructure.
Continuous reinvention requires a deep understanding of transformative technologies like generative AI, capable of revolutionizing every aspect of the enterprise. By aggressively deploying this technology across operations, companies in Southeast Asia can achieve and exceed new performance benchmarks. Wee Wei’s insights highlight the importance of embracing continuous reinvention as a strategy for long-term success in a rapidly changing business landscape.
