"Hey, Siri," "Hey, Alexa." I guess you are all aware by now of what these two words in combination do. They enable the next generation of search dimension, a search that listens to your daily conversations and actually serves you with content based on spoken commands. At the same time, it enables you to control your house, car infotainment, and much more. Statista forecasts that by 2023 the number of these devices in use is going to jump from today’s three billion to eight billion.

Picture driven search is the next step on the horizon, and all of a sudden, we are not so far from the Terminator Cyborg, reading pushed information in his ocular device about his environment and the subjects in sight.

The question is, what are the prerequisites? One for sure is the roll out of 5G networks to support the data needs. The 5G standard is assumed to be 20 times faster than 4G. From 3G that most of you remembered to 5G, there is a difference in top speed of 42Mbps to 10Gbps. Latency will go down from 4G’s 50-100ms to 1-10ms. All this will likely be arriving in three to five years in Germany. South Korea already has it deployed.

Urbanization; one of the mega trends that is still accelerating with two main effects: congestion levels are still increasing daily in major cities, and housing prices as well as rents are sky rocketing. This leads to spillover effects, car ownership becomes expansive in major cities and micro apartments are seeing a rise. By 2050, 66 percent of the world’s population is anticipated to live in urban cities according to a study by the UN, where passenger and goods mobility needs in these densely populated places will rise dramatically.

“Picture driven search is the next step on the horizon”

A race is out there for the mobility market of urban cities, rental companies, car manufacturers, public transport providers, leasing companies, and a multitude of new entrants sharing a pie that is currently growing exponentially. All this has to be supported by ever less polluting mobility concepts to achieve ambitious pollution reduction objectives in these urban places. According to research, the market in Germany for micro apartments has spiked in 2018 to one and a half billion Euros up from 810 million Euros in transaction the year before. Looking at car ownership in New York, it is estimated annually at 18.926 dollars by Fortune Magazine primarily driven by parking cost which is almost double the national average.

Taking all of the above into consideration, there is an unprecedented change in the industry happening as we speak. One can only feel for the teams in the manufacturers— chasing CO2 objectives they have to close down operations on internal combustion engines that have served for a century, explore new technology in electric and hydrogen, reinvent the distribution, and service model as direct sales are rising and ownership changes to usage based payments. According to a study by Deloitte, the European car sharing market will have a volume of more than 160,000 cars and 15.6 million users by 2020. According to a study by Ameriresearch the on-demand transportation market in the US is going to be 298.7 billion dollars in 2025 up from 78 billion dollars in 2017.

What this also means is that the automotive ecosystem is changing and with this, the supplier industry is changing. Franchised dealer networks have decreased in Europe by 15 percent and more in the last decade and are forecasted to further shrink.

The good news is, for those laying the right plans now, there are great business models out there that will lead to a cleaner, more efficient, and consolidated world. The challenge now is to understand those movements and set your business early on the right path; do not become the blockbuster of your industry by betting on lending DVDs out of a physical location in a world of streaming.

Leading your teams to awareness and openness for the changes out there, identifying the right streams, and making sure it is a culture and not a single outpost in your team will enable you to shift at the right moment and make sure you can take your fair share in this new world.