What does 5G mean to business leaders?
In my mind, the modern smartphone era began on June 29, 2007, as the original iPhone went on sale for the first time. In the decade plus since, everything has changed - and yet it feels like we’re only at the beginning.
The original iPhone operated on a 2G network, delivering what we might now call a pathetic 1 megabit per second. Still, it fundamentally transformed how people communicate and experience both the internet and the world around them. A year later, when iPhone 3G went on sale, we jumped to a whopping 7 mbps. Starting around 2010, 4G gave us speeds up to 200 mbps and ushered in a series of now commonplace disruptions like ride sharing, the gig economy, voice activated interfaces and more. Each new generation in wireless standards has done so much more than accelerate download speeds; each has enabled new services and startups that the previous generation simply could not imagine.
Now, in late 2019, we are witnessing the dawn of the 5G era. This next generation of wireless technology, like the ones before it, holds tremendous transformational potential. According to the GSMA, 5G has a theoretical max of 10,000 mbps or 10 GIGAbits per second. That is much faster than most home broadband connections. It’s early days, to be sure, with 5G networks in limited deployment and only a few handsets on the market. Real world, early tests are showing download speeds ranging from 600 mbps to 1.5 gbps - well short of 10 gbps, but still much faster than your average 4G LTE connection.
Speed improvement is really only part of the 5G equation. I think about 5G as a 3-legged stool where improved speed is one leg. The second leg would be a massive reduction in latency - from around 70 ms on 4G to a target of less than 1 ms on 5G. And, the third leg is simultaneous device support - the 5G spec calls for 10x device support vs. 4G LTE, at a MINIMUM. Speed, low latency and a massive boost in simultaneous device connections is a potent cocktail for the future.
But, what do all of these advancements mean to business and technology leaders? To really understand the implications, one must take a step back and recognize that 5G - while transformative in its own right - is also an ingredient technology to a bunch of other disruptions. 5G will enable and enhance rapidly evolving technologies like AI, AR/VR, IOT, voice, connected and self-driving vehicles, smart home, wearables, and more.
Taken together, these technologies are the building blocks of what some have called “the era of connected intelligence.”
To prepare for this next phase of technology evolution, I believe that companies must get SICC: Seamless, Immersive, Clairvoyant and Collaborative. Let’s review each of these pillars in turn:
Seamless
Creating seamless experiences for customers is about being fast, fluid and friction free.
Fast. People hate waiting. Several studies suggest that page load times on mobile need to be 3 seconds or less - and that’s in a world of relatively slow 4G connectivity. Anything more and you risk significantly higher bounce rates and drastically lower conversion rates, as illustrated in this chart from Akamai’s State of Online Retail Performance.
Very few sites achieve this goal today. It seems only logical that in the 5G era, when a user can download a feature length 4k movie in a few seconds, having to wait more than a second for text and imagery to load will be unacceptable. It is important to note that 5G by itself will not fix most slow pages - because, obviously, data transfer speeds alone do not determine page load time. 5G will not address tag bloat or browser processing time, etc. Now is the time to get serious about accelerating page load times and new(ish) site architecture options like AMP and PWA are worth strong consideration (speaking of which, check out this whitepaper I co-authored with the great folks at Y Media Labs).
Fluid. Customers expect to be able to move from one device to another without having to start a task over. And increasingly, our devices aren’t just connected to the internet, they are connected to each other. Alexa controls the lights in my home. My smart watch tracks my daily activity and sends it to my phone. I can send navigation instructions from my phone to the telematics system in my car. I can beam video from my phone to my TV. And so on. These sorts of experiences leveraging inputs and outputs from multiple devices will become ever more commonplace as 5G continues to roll out.
Friction-free. Today’s digital experiences are packed full of unnecessary friction. The average retail checkout flow has more than 20 fields. The staples.com flow has about 5. Technology enables us to remove friction from all kinds of processes. GeniCan removes friction from the replenishment process by adding a voice-enabled barcode scanner to your trash can. Scan the barcode on that bag of chips as you throw it away and it is automatically added to your shopping list. 5G speeds will make points of friction more obvious to end users - best to focus on eliminating them before 5G reaches full scale.
The 5G era will require businesses to optimize this fast/fluid/friction-free flywheel for their customer experiences.
Immersive
360-degree, 8k video. Virtual and augmented reality. These technologies hold tremendous potential to reinvent customer engagement. And they require transmission of large volumes of data. While 5G is not necessarily required to power any of these experiences, it will reduce buffering, improve overall fidelity and create a much more immersive experience across any of those technologies.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen many demonstrates of 5G use cases at various trade shows including CES and Mobile World Congress. Two of the most compelling examples are:
Intel + Ericsson. At CES a couple of years ago, Intel had a huge multi-sport demo cage set up in one corner of their booth. They held batting practice, golf demos, played a bit of basketball, and more. At both ends of the cage were 360-degree cameras that were then hardwired to an Intel-powered laptop outside the cage. A VR headset was in turn hardwired to the laptop. Visitors to the booth could put on the headset and be transported inside the cage, watching demos up close in 360 degrees via high-resolution cameras. That by itself was impressive, but even more so was the 5G-powered version at the nearby Ericsson booth. Situated about 50 yards away was a second demo station mirroring the same experience with one crucial exception: it was wireless. The two companies were using 5G to beam the high-resolution video across the show floor. You could not tell a difference between the hardwired and wireless versions.
Ericsson. At MWC in Barcelona, I ran across what looked like an old school racing video game. Multiple huge TVs, a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals and a seat. But visitors were not playing a video game. Rather, they were controlling a golf cart in a parking lot about 60 miles away. The video and the control signals were all transmitted over 5G. When the cart hit a speed bump on the course, you’d feel the haptic feedback in real time. It as incredibly immersive and a fantastic demo of what will become possible with 5G deployments.
Potentially one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of these technologies is the limitations of current head-mounted displays. Those systems are continuing to mature, and we seem to be getting very close to a world where augmented reality can be experienced via a relatively fashion-friendly pair of eyeglasses. Companies like Vuzix and North are making great strides here, and Apple has long been rumored to be working on their own AR glasses. Again, 5G has potential to empower and enhance these initiatives.
Marketers should increasingly be thinking about creating content that can be experienced rather than merely read, watched or consumed.
Clairvoyant
Our connected - and interconnected - devices are already getting pretty good at understanding our context and delivering information or experiences before we ask. Various map and navigation apps will send a push notification when it’s time to leave for your next meeting because it sees the location on the calendar and knows the traffic conditions between your current location and that destination. If you miss a phone call from someone on your favorite contact list, the next time you pick up your iPhone, Siri may prompt you to call that person back.
As more and more devices begin to share data and intelligence (largely enabled and enhanced by 5G), predictive experiences will become more commonplace. To illustrate, let me share another example I saw at a trade show: a proof of concept in the Hertz booth at MWC. Here, your phone is literally the key to get in and start the vehicle. But that’s just the beginning: the telematics system accesses your calendar and automatically populates the nav system with the location of your next meeting. It syncs your music and podcasts. It adjusts the seat and mirrors to your preferred location. And it enables you to pay for gas and parking without having to exit the vehicle and swipe a credit card.
Brands today, of course, are already working hard to get the building blocks of clairvoyant marketing in place. Boxed, the online wholesale club, is leveraging machine learning to predict when customers will reorder items and claims to be closing in on “autonomous shopping.” Nike has been aggressively investing in first party data and infrastructure - arguably since the launch of Nike + more than a decade ago. Most of the brand’s newer retail locations are heavily data-driven, including the “speed shop” at its “house of innovation” on 5th Avenue in New York City. Taking up nearly an entire floor, this section uses sales data from both physical and online stores to track trending and popular items. The entire section is merchandised accordingly, aiming to get people in and out quickly.
Data-driven marketing is not a new concept, obviously. But it is about to move past reactive and towards proactive. In that sort or world, where devices are seamlessly delivering content and experiences that we want at exactly the right time - without the user having to initiate, what happens to a poorly retargeted ad? It might just move from minor nuisance to a complete anathema.
Becoming clairvoyant in this manner clearly requires a lot of data about the user. Set against a post-Cambridge Analytica landscape where privacy and data rights are becoming mainstream topics of conversation (and regulation), brands must be careful here. But I believe that it is possible to build clairvoyant capabilities in a privacy friendly way. And I believe that it is a strategic imperative for brands.
Prepare to predict - or become obsolete.
Collaborative
Charles Darwin wrote: “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
The pace of technology change over the last 20+ years has led to many unlikely alliances, including and especially in the automotive space. There is perhaps no better illustration of this than the recent partnership between BWM and Daimler (parent company of Mercedes Benz). The two historically fierce competitors have agreed to jointly create a $1B+ fund in an effort to help guide the future of transportation. Former Daimler chairman Dieter Zetsche said on stage at MWC 2019: “Yesterday, the most important part was to lock your engineering department so that nobody could copy anything. Today … we are convinced we have to do it open source, because we need the capabilities of the whole community.”
These sorts of unexpected partnerships are only the beginning. Collaboration between humans and machines is also on the rise, and there is no shortage of examples illustrating this point. Robotic sentries now roam the aisles of grocery stores, offering help to shoppers and keeping an ever vigilant eye out for spills and/or items out of stock or on the wrong shelf. When the robot spots something out of place, it must alert a human associate, who (at least for now) is ultimately responsible for correcting the issue. These robots work by patrolling each and every aisle, scanning store shelves with high resolution cameras and beaming the imagery to a central server. It’s a tremendous amount of data that is crushing store wifi systems, so AT&T is stepping in to provide localized 5G infrastructure that is better suited to handle the data volume.
Other examples of human + machine collaboration abound, including in areas that are a bit unexpected: those that require some level of creativity. Perhaps the best example of this I’ve seen to date comes again from Mobile World Congress. Antoni Gaudi is a Spanish architect behind such masterpieces as Park Guell, Casa Batllo and Sagrada Familia. His work is practically synonymous with Barcelona, the host city to Mobile World Congress. So it should come as no surprise that IBM decided to pay homage to his genius with a brilliant installation above their booth at the world’s biggest mobile trade show. To design the structure, they let Watson feast on a wide range of Gaudi material - his bio, photos of his work, his preferred media and design methodologies, etc. Watson came back with structural ideas, materials and more - that were ultimately fed to human architects to design the final installation, which was a beautifully modern - and interactive - interpretation that leveraged classic Gaudi traits.
Smart business leaders will embrace unexpected alliances and build cultures of collaboration - including collaborative efforts between humans and machines.
In summary, I believe marketers and business leaders must get SICC in order to survive the coming changes wrought by 5G:
Seamless: The 5G era will require businesses to optimize this fast/fluid/friction-free flywheel for their customer experiences.
Immersive: Marketers should increasingly be thinking about creating content that can be experienced rather than merely read, watched or consumed.
Clairvoyant: Prepare to predict – or become obsolete
Collaborative: Smart business leaders will embrace unexpected alliances and build cultures of collaboration - including collaborative efforts between humans and machines.
As always, I welcome your thoughts and feedback via this form or on twitter.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: this is an adaptation of a 45-minute presentation I’ve given as keynotes at multiple conferences over the last year or so. To inquire about this or other presentations for your event, click here.
