All Companies are becoming Tech Companies

[Arthur Hanson]

I was just listening to the Moynihan, the chairman of B of A, and they have spent 25 billion on coding. When you really think about it, all a major international bank it is a statistics and communications company of massive scale. Increasing automation of even the physical transactions left is increasing dramatically and that's a shrinking part of total business equation. He is right, basically the modern international bank is a statistics, data base, AI/ML, communications company on a massive scale. Even though banks still have physical branches, they have become massive tech companies that have to stay on the leading edge or surrender to the competition. This can be seen as the branches are increasingly automated both in customer contact with ever more sophisticated ATMs and back end processes. If they don't, the online brokerages will eat their lunch, by handling all their transactions. The financial industry has literally become a fast moving high tech industry as many industries are having to convert to. As all industries from financial to manufacturing to even farming are basically evolving into the modern world and becoming tech industries, the demand for semis/mems/nanotechnology from what are primarily semi companies will drive demand forward at a blistering pace. Even the energy business is becoming increasingly high tech at a blistering pace. Fracking requires increasingly sophisticated tech at every step of the process. The semi/nanotech industry although not new, is still in its early stages of development and the biggest frontiers are before it.

In short, everything we touch is now or going to be touched by tech with ever greater impact and increasing at a geometric clip. This will drive obsolescence in everything at an accelerating rate requiring whole new thought processes, social and business structures. Construction all types will be the next growth frontier for the high tech world and this will change the world in ways most can't even imagine. I hold three contractors licenses and my wife works in construction supply and I see this as almost virgin territory for the tech industry. Agriculture and construction will be the next huge drivers of the tech industry. On top of this the penetration of tech will continue to accelerate.

 

[count]

Even industries we don't traditionally consider tech - the oil industry is a great example - are finding themselves digitized. The oil industry is a particularly interesting example because the process of finding and developing oil reserves is a function of collecting and interpreting geophysical data. This is especially the case in unconventional (read shale) oil and gas. The companies are increasingly turning to ML to carry out these tasks traditionally performed by geophysicists and production engineers. The leader in oil and gas digitization is probably EOG, and if you read their conference call minutes, you'll notice they spend at least a quarter of their time talking about data and what they are doing with it.

 

[Daniel Nenni]

The other thing I might add is that tech companies are software dominated so get your computer science degrees! And with the AI wave coming it will be all about software, absolutely.

 

[Arthur Hanson]

The other thing I might add is that tech companies are software dominated so get your computer science degrees! And with the AI wave coming it will be all about software, absolutely.

Dan, I agree with you completely. A lot of raw science and engineering will be done by robotics/Ai/ML. Robotic systems have already made drug discoveries on their own. Directing AI/ML and knowing what AI/ML systems to use will be the skill set of the future. True AI will use ML to learn and discover on its own. We are definitely going to enter a "Brave New World". The very definition of work is going to change radically.