The Future of Commerce with Digital Business

The business world around us is changing at a rapid pace and generally, in countries of the west, we are experiencing the death of high street. Not that long ago, we saw well-established companies such as Blockbuster, HMV, Kodak, Nokia and BlackBerry pushed to the brink by smart competitors such as Netflix, Spotify and several other digital businesses reinventing existing industries. In each case, there were opportunities to act before a crisis engulfed these organisations. Today, digital strategies such as investments in general information technology and IT outsourcing are major elements of overall business strategy, sometimes allowing firms to differentiate from competitors, other times creating demands to conform with competitive norms. When it comes to the digital workplace, artificial intelligence and machine learning are moving into most fields, thus the popular opinion, and fear, is that machines are encroaching upon human work activities, and taking an ever-larger percentage of this work away for good, from the dirty and dangerous, to the dull, and decisions. In this chapter, we examine how innovative business models, combined with the appropriate digital strategies, will transform future businesses. We will also explore how disruptive technologies such as social media, mobile, data analytics, cloud, wearables, RPA, robotics, AI and the IoT can be applied in powerful combinations, together with the appropriate digital marketing tools, to give businesses a competitive advantage.