Safdar Zaman, Head of IT Strategy and Governance at Nakheel

Varun Malhorta, Director – Process Improvement & Centre of Excellence at Gulf Marketing Group

Albert Dias, CTO & Co-founder of Musafir

Noman Rasheed, CIO at Noor Bank

Moderated by Bexta Tierney, the session dealt on the topic about Customers Facing IT Innovations.

Need and innovation complement each other. Need or demand drives innovation, and innovation creates the need.

Innovation in the next 3-5 years will be very different as to how innovation is now. Experts see that there is a hug potential for innovation for AI, Blockchain and Robotics in the new few years specifically for customer data and data intelligence.

According to Albert Dias, history & legacy affects adaptation to innovation. One of the reasons why some businesses don’t do well anymore is because they’ve been unwilling to challenge the status quo and there is a level of unwillingness to change the way they do things. Technology, in the same way as skill, affect adaptation for the fact that development & marketing strategies for businesses can no longer be just strategies, for it to be effective, it has be digital strategies.

With technology starting to take over consumers and businesses, humans and machines will have more and deeper interaction in the years to come.