Online marketplaces – Alibaba, Amazon, eBay and others – are big business, but downunder we do it differently.

While Amazon dominates the western world as a marketplace destination (China belongs to online shopping website Taobao and B2C online retail market Tmall), in Australia and New Zealand we’ve missed that megalith. In New Zealand the market really belongs to TradeMe, 20-year-old online shopping veteran, with nearly five million registered users, while in Australia, Ebay holds the greatest market share.

Ebay Australia receives around 69 million monthly visitors; behind that, UK-founded Gumtree, with 35 million visitors per month, and only then, Amazon Australia (with 19 million visitors).

“Above all, marketplaces are contributing to retailers’ bottom lines.”

Those numbers are still climbing. As buy now pay later schemes and click and collect models gain traction, and as online marketplaces proliferate, a new wave of online growth is expected.

“In the five years following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), e-commerce boomed,” says KPMG in its 2020 Australian Retail Outlook.

According to the report, while total retail growth fell to three percent over the five years, e-commerce grew at 21 percent – hitting peak growth in 2011 at 30 per cent.

“In the wake of the GFC, Australians had permanently changed how they shopped and as the purse strings eased, e-commerce growth rates accelerated.”

Landscape shifting deals are being done: In the last year Amazon Australia launched its Amazon Hub, Ebay Australia partnered with Afterpay, and in 2019 Catch Group, the country’s largest daily deals site, combined with Kmart and Target to create a single multi-channel marketplace ecosystem.

Catch.com is currently Australia’s largest ‘daily deals’ site. Founded by entrepreneurial brothers Gabby and Hezi Leibovich in 2006, the deals site added an online marketplace for third-party sellers in 2017. The company has only grown from there – more than 2.1m last year – and was acquired in by Wesfarmers in 2019 for AU$230 million.

Marketplaces like Catch.com have experienced significant growth in the last year, new research from Mirakl, a SaaS marketplace platform provider, says. According to its 2021 Enterprise Marketplace Index, online marketplaces have been outperforming the general e-commerce sector at a rate of two to one.

The research shows marketplaces growing by more than 80 percent year-over-year globally in the fourth quarter of 2020, more than double the rate of overall e-commerce growth.

“Marketplaces retailers a clear advantage: Achieve scale and agility through a curated ecosystem of quality third-party sellers,” says the report.

“This network of sellers exploded, increasing by an average of 46 percent year-over-year, as retailers recruited and onboarded at an accelerated pace to meet immediate shopper demand.

“Concurrently, alongside the rise in sellers, the gross merchandise value per seller jumped 24 percent.”

Together, says Mirakl, these two factors – seller growth and growing sellers – produced the massive momentum of marketplace retail.

“A new class of seller supply has emerged: Traditional brands and manufacturers seeking a path to digital, and digital-native brands aiming to accelerate their distribution to drive their growth mandate.”

While TradeMe is the biggest in New Zealand, it’s challenger TheMarket.com, the Warehouse Group-backed ‘curated lifestyle marketplace’ that’s growing the fastest.

Taking 14 months and NZ$12 million to build and launch, the platform offers third party retailers access to 3.5 million active customers, as well as localised customer service and a distributed last-mile collect and return network, for a ‘frictionless customer experience’.

Customers can click and collect products from MarketPoint locations around New Zealand, which also act as a drop off point for returns. The platform has attracted leading brands including Noel Leeming, Lancome and, of course, The Warehouse.

As commerce continues its shift online, expect marketplace platforms to proliferate for a while yet, says Mirakl.

“Above all, marketplaces are contributing to retailers’ bottom lines,” says the report.

“Marketplace retailers found a scale solution to the most central act of retailing: Connecting shoppers to products, recasting themselves as something more – trusted shopping destinations poised to win in a rapidly growing but increasingly competitive environment.”

It’s been a busy few months for Melbourne-founded digital global payment platform Airwallex.

Not only has it just completed a huge new funding round, but it’s quickly put that cash injection to work, acquiring Hong Kong-based Unicard, after receiving regulatory consent from the local Monetary Authority to become a controlling shareholder in the company.

Airwallex is a financial platform that lets customers conduct financial transactions across countries and currencies. Using Airwallex, SMEs and larger users can efficiently conduct multicurrency and cross-border transactions, massively simplifying international business. Current clients include such internet bigwigs as JD.com, Tencent and Ctrip, and MasterCard.

“The digital economy is going to be the centre of the world’s economic structure.”

Airwallex says it will continue to support the prepaid Unicard product, but promises ‘access to new and innovative payment and collection solutions’ for Hong Kong-based users, with plans to launch various new card payment products to make ‘multi-currency, cross-border transactions in a safe, convenient, compliant and cost-effective’ some time in 2021.

It’s not just hyping its Hong Kong expansion that’s been keeping the Airwallex busy. The company is also on a recruiting drive, following its recent successful funding round. In 2019, Series C fundraising brought the company value to more than US$1 billion, and late last year a Series D funding round added a further US$200 million in equity funding to the company’s coffers.

From Aussie startup to billion dollar unicorn in three and half years? Not bad, and with more than 600 staff across 12 global offices now, that’s some fast growth.

But it’s a rapidly growing industry as a whole, and with the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating demand for digital payments, Airwallex has ridden that wave for record growth. Last year, the revenue management company reported a 50 percent uptick in customers and triple-digit net revenue growth for 2020.

“A major shift in the way businesses operate from offline to online is something Airwallex predicted from our inception,” says Jack Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Airwallex.

“Businesses are now racing to embrace digital transformation at an unprecedented rate,” he says. “We are more certain than ever that the digital economy is going to be the centre of the world’s economic structure.”

And while demand for digital payment solutions has increased faster than anyone expected, that hasn’t seen the company slow its aggressive growth strategy. Zhang says Airwallex has been investing heavily over the past few years to build the necessary global digital infrastructure to better move and manage their money across borders.

If anything, the company has ‘increased execution velocity in product innovation, infrastructure and coverage expansion’, says Zhang.

Last year also saw the roll out of new Airwallex functionality including virtual multi-currency debit cards with Visa, bank feed integration with Xero and improved card payment acceptance capabilities.

The company also found time to collect four major awards at the 2020 Finnies, including Fintech Organisation of The Year (the top prize), Excellence in Payments, and the People’s Choice award for Organisation of The Year.

The company’s president and co-founder Lucy Liu was also named Emerging FinTech Leader of the Year.

As we settle into 2021 – if you call two Auckland lockdowns in a month ‘settled’ – there’s a new business landscape out there for techies looking to boss up their career. After all, with the radical changes in the way we live, work and shop brought by the pandemic, demand for IT professionals is huge.

So what’s hot in the IT jobs market?

According to recruiting giant Hays, security, cloud, data and development is where it’s at 2021, both globally and locally.

Cyber
As remote and mixed working environments push IT security to its limits – and as generalised Covid-19 chaos continues to upend traditional modes of working – experts in cybersecurity are in hot demand. According to a report from the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, as it stands, employment in cybersecurity would have to grow 89 percent globally to meet security requirements.

Demand in this area will be acute and supply will be limited

“It’s going to be a challenge to fill all of the new vacancies, as an estimated 3.1 million professionals will be required in the next 12 months to bridge the global cybersecurity talent gap,” says James Milligan, global head of tech at Hays.

“Cybersecurity will account for many of the fastest-growing jobs for tech professionals in 2021, including security operations; governance, risk and compliance; identity and privileged access management; cloud security and architecture. As teams expand, other jobs in demand will include leadership roles such as chief or manager of information security.”

Cloud experts
According to one survey, more than 80 percent of global IT leaders have increased their use of cloud as a result of the Covid-19 crisis. And that shift to the cloud has been rapid for many, leading to substandard rollouts, all in the name of business continuity.

“Circumstances at the onset of the pandemic meant that initial migrations were typically very quick in order to get all employees online as soon as possible,” says Milligan.

“Therefore, organisations now need to take the time to ensure these systems are robust and as optimised as they could and should be.”

For cloud engineers and cloud architects job-hunting in 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are the two primary skills, with about 80 percent market share.

“I predict that demand in this area will be acute and supply will be limited, so it’s certainly a hot area to be working in.”

Data scientists
With the rise of smart devices, sensor tech and digital everything, someone needs to analyse all that complex data.

“Changes in the way we live our everyday lives have led to many of us placing greater reliance on our devices, meaning organisations have even more data available to them. And with more data comes the need for more people to analyse it,” says Milligan.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2020, data analysts and scientists are the fastest growing demand segment across all industries.

“Data analysts and data scientists will be high on the list of the hottest tech jobs over the coming 12 months… After all, a core element of any platform is the insights it can provide, and organisations need data people for that.

“The important role data science plays within businesses has increased dramatically in recent years, as analysing and interpreting complex data helps organisations make informed and timely decisions.”

Developers, developers, developers
It’s tech that powers modern businesses, and from the front-end to the back, developers will be in demand this year as organisations look to create new products, tools and services in response to the shifting business landscape.

“Those developers working for tech organisations – organisations which provide essential products, services or tools which consumers will always need in this new world – will be particularly high in demand,” says Milligan.

“It’s important to note, too, that these software development roles will also be absolutely crucial in enabling organisations to innovate to solve the many new problems that have emerged as a result of the pandemic.”

Similarly, the demand for DevOps will remain high too.

“Many more organisations now have a DevOps team than was the case just a few years ago, so there will continue to be jobs in demand in this field, such as platform, build, and reliability engineers.

“In fact, there’s been a 40 to 45 per cent growth in the market over the last five years, with DevOps Zone predicting this will rise even higher.”

Globally, the numbers look awesome – 1.3 billion years spent using the internet; trillions spent on ecommerce – but what does the Digital 2021 Report (published by We Are Social and Hootsuite) say about Downunder?

We like the internet. A lot.

According to the report, the average internet user now spends almost seven hours per day using the internet across all devices, equating to more than 48 hours per week online, or two full days out of a seven-day week.

We now spend around 42 percent of our waking lives online.

Put another way, we now spend around 42 percent of our waking lives online, almost as much time as we do sleeping. If current trends continue, the world’s internet users will spend almost 12 trillion hours online this year, which translates into more than 1.3 billion years of combined human time.

In New Zealand, there are currently 4.55 million internet users, an increase of around 84,000 (+1.9 percent) between 2020 and 2021. In Australia, the number is about 22.82 million and rising at a rate of 2.3 percent per annum.

The global average of time spent on the internet is six hours and 54 minutes. New Zealand comes in just below that average with six hours and 39 minutes. Australians are slightly less connected, with six hours and 13 minutes spent online per day.

Filipinos, Brazilians, Colombians and South Africans all spend significantly more time online than that – an average of over 10 hours per day on the internet.

Who’s most likely to be offline? Japan seems to spend the least amount of time online, at less than 4.5 hours per day.

That goes for social too.

For daily time spent on social media, both Australia and New Zealand clock well below the global average of two hours and twenty five minutes per day. Australians spend about an hour and 46 minutes on social per day; New Zealanders slightly above that with an hour and 55 minutes.

Once again Filipinos use social media the most at a whopping average of four hours and fifteen minutes daily. Again, the Japanese consume the least with just 51 minutes social media use per day.

All in all, it adds up. According to the report, the world will spend a total of 3.7 trillion hours on social media in 2021.

The rise of eCommerce
eCommerce went bananas over 2020, with the pandemic driving businesses everywhere to commit to their digital shopfronts.

Globally, more than 76 percent of internet users aged 16 to 64 shop online within any given month. That’s slightly higher than Australia’s average (just under 75 percent of Aussies shop online each month), and significantly higher than the 70.9 percent of Kiwis who do the same.

Globally, Indonesians are the most frequently online shoppers (87.1 percent), with Egyptians the most online shopping averse (56.6).

And what are we buying? Over 2020, the fashion and beauty category accounted for the largest share of global B2C ecommerce revenues in 2020 at more than US$665 billion. The food and personal care category ballooned (41 percent), as did fashion & beauty (27 percent growth), digital music sales (26 percent) and toys, DIY and hobbies (25 percent), as retail therapy soothed locked down shoppers.

Last year was the first time in the 10 year research series that the mobility and accommodation (US$593.6 billion) category hasn’t captured the largest B2C ecommerce share. Indeed, the category experienced a crippling -51 percent change in fortunes last year, representing half a trillion US dollar drop in consumer spending.

Mobile rules
There were 6.56 million mobile connections in New Zealand in January this year, equivalent to 135.6 percent of the total population. In Australia connections hit 32.47 million, an equivalent of 126.6 percent of the total population.

Globally, 5.22 billion people use a mobile phone today, around 66.6 percent of the world’s total population. Since January 2020 the total number of mobile connections has increased by 72 million (0.9 percent) to reach a total of 8.02 billion at the start of 2021.

And our connections are getting faster. The increased bandwidth of 5G networks sees both Australia and New Zealand well outperform the global average mobile download speed of 42.70 Mbps. Australia enjoys speeds of 112.68 Mbps with New Zealand at 78.53 Mbps.

India has the worst mobile speeds with 12.91Mbps, and we’re all dwarfed by the UAE, with the fastest average speed of 177.52Mbps.

After a week of blocking Australian news sites – and several others – Facebook and Australian lawmakers seem to have come to an uneasy truce.

The Government has been attempting to force Facebook to negotiate content sharing deals with Australia’s major publishers since last year. The News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code would establish a mandatory code of conduct for digital platforms and news media businesses when bargaining over news content posted on social media.

Facebook doesn’t want to pay for news content at all of course, and things came to a head last week, with the social media giant blocking the sharing of news content – and lots of other stuff – in Australia, en masse. Major sites blocked in Australia last week included ABC, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian and The Age.

“Oligarchies will consolidate, and consumers will get nothing.”

But Facebook is using a sledgehammer here, not a scalpel. Among the collateral damage, Bureau of Meteorology, Suicide Prevention Australia and even New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission, all misidentified by Facebook as Australian news outlets and banned from having links to their website content shared.

Facebook’s Simon Milner, VP of APAC public policy, has since apologised for the temporary bans, charactering the company’s restriction of news content across the country of Australia as ‘a really hard thing to do’.

“We are sorry for the mistakes we made”.

The social media giant’s restriction of news has been met with almost universal criticism from politicians around the world, with US House of Representatives chairman David Cicilline characterising the Facebook’s coercive behaviour as ‘not compatible with democracy’.

But that was then, and the news is back on now after the Australian Government promised to introduce amendments to the code  to ‘provide further clarity’ to digital platforms and news media businesses about the way the Code is intended to operate. Facebook today announced it has signed ‘letters of intent’ with three Australian publishers: Private Media whose stable includes The Mandarin and Smart Company, Schwartz Media and Solstice.

The amendments are small, but Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher, says they provide ‘further impetus for parties to engage in commercial negotiations outside the Code’, a central feature of the Government’s proposed framework.

The amendments were met with immediate approval from Facebook, which has now restored news-sharing in Australia.

“It’s always been our intention to support journalism in Australia and around the world, and we’ll continue to invest in news globally,” says Campbell Brown, Facebook’s VP of global news partnerships, “and resist efforts by media conglomerates to advance regulatory frameworks that do not take account of the true value exchange between publishers and platforms like Facebook.

“The government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won’t automatically be subject to a forced negotiation,”

News content creators have struggled to monetise their online businesses. While many of the grievances against Facebook are legitimate – fake news, et al – Facebook has filled a market gap, offering low-cost, targeted advertising to audiences, that content creators struggle to compete with. Why would Facebook want to change that arrangement?

“What the proposed law introduced in Australia fails to recognise is the fundamental nature of the relationship between our platform and publishers,” says Facebook’s Brown.

“Contrary to what some have suggested, Facebook does not steal news content. Publishers choose to share their stories on Facebook. From finding new readers to getting new subscribers and driving revenue, news organisations wouldn’t use Facebook if it didn’t help their bottom lines.”

But while Facebook is underplaying the importance of news content on its platform, it’s news content – shared across Facebook audiences without recompense to the original publisher – that makes the social giant’s US$84.2b worth of global advertising medicine go down.

It’s just that advertising used to pay for journalism. Now it pays for platforms.

Unfortunately, news isn’t a simple commodity like any other. It’s an essential service. When a privately-owned service provider can switch off the news for 25 million people because it disagrees with the laws of the land, that’s a big problem – especially when that platform is a notorious source of misinformation itself.

For now, the news is back on and Facebook, which has done deals in the UK with publishers including Sky News, The Guardian and Telegraph Media Group for its Facebook News section, is talking up its plans to ‘invest’ in supporting the news industry and ‘partner’ with news publishers.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg earlier comments that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has told him he intends to engage in ‘good faith’ negotiations and sign commercial deals – discussions for which are apparently underway – with news publishers came to fruition – somewhat – with the news of the signing of letters of intent. Commercial agreements will apparently come into force within 60 days of full deals being signed. Facebook signed a similar deal earlier this week with Perth’s Seven West Media.

So what does that mean for the future of news in Australia? What does it mean for competition?

“Where will this end up?” asks Joshua Gans, professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto and advisor to the ACCC on the Digital Platforms Inquiry in 2019.

“It will end up with the large digital platforms doing deals with the largest news outlets,” he says. “Those deals will be multi-year lump-sum payments which enable everyone to go about their business.”

Gans says that, as it stands, the government’s legislation will fail to deliver any competitive outcome whatsoever.

“There will be no new digital platforms, no new content providers, no more competition. The shareholders of the large digital platforms will be a few million dollars poorer and the shareholders of large Australian news outlets a few million dollars richer.

“As often happens in Australia, oligarchies will consolidate, and consumers will get nothing.”

As urban populations rise, as environmental concerns increasingly come to the fore and as the Eastern Distributor remains as locked as ever, it’s increasingly apparent: Humanity’s relationship with the motorcar will have to change.

Which is good. Self-driving cars, intelligent intersections and apps that help you find that elusive LAST available parking space; what’s not to love?

Smart traffic management systems are set to reduce emissions and congestion globally and save cities around US$277 billion.

According to Juniper research, such smart traffic management systems are set to reduce emissions and congestion globally – and save cities around the world around US$277 billion – in the next four years.

But how?

There’s a few methods. Smart intersections are one way. Leveraging AI-enabled automation and connectivity to manage the traffic flow in busy areas in real-time can have significant impacts on the total time drivers spend in the car and the amount of congestion on the road.

It’s not all congestion detection and number crunching however. One less obvious place where both emissions and wasted hours can be saved is parking.

Let’s face it, the average city parking building sucks. Size and complexity of facilities can mean that drivers spend several minutes just looking for a park, resulting in unnecessary congestion, emissions, and time wasted, not to mention having to suffer through inefficient payment methods, unnecessary stress and collision risk.

‘Smart parking’ technologies aim to solve these issues by harnessing parking sensor data and smart platform tech to provide real-time intelligence to guide drivers.

The technology generally comes in two parts: Sensor tech and driver guidance systems. Simple surface and flush mount sensors utilise magnetic sensing technology to detect the presence (or absence) of parked vehicles. This information is then transmitted to a nearby gateway which collects and collates the information from several dozen sensors. From there a signal is transmitted to the smart parking management system for processing and dissemination to the waiting driver.

Alternatively, overhead parking sensors can gather information from several dozen spaces simultaneously.

“These sensors typically utilise a combination of artificial intelligence and/or machine learning to ‘recognise’ empty spaces,” says Juniper, “edge computing to allow the real-time processing and analysis of sensor data, and GPS to identify the precise geographical position of vacant spaces.”

Dynamic display messaging can direct drivers to vacant parks and mobile apps can offer turn-by-turn directions to vacant spaces.

Such apps can also include payment and reservation functionality, as well as the ability to ‘top up’ their accounts for extended parking.

In older rollouts however, cybersecurity can be an issue, as it can when cybersecurity is not prioritised in the early stages of the project.

“Where security issues are not taken into consideration during the initial planning and implementation phases, this can lead to an increased number of threats not just to the integrity of citywide infrastructure, but the security of citizens’ data,” says Juniper.

That data could potentially include licence plate numbers, registration details, financial information, and movement patterns, says Juniper.

While platform suppliers will need to bring their own security expertise to the table, cities must also take responsibility for ensuring that ‘security at every layer of the system is accounted for, and that security measures are built and implemented with flexibility and future requirements in mind’.

And with an international appetite for the technology, Juniper is forecasting growth. The research company forecasts that investment into smart parking will reach US$1 billion by 2025 (rising from just US$460 million this year).

Juniper Research also predicts that the total annual congestion and emissions cost savings achievable globally through the implementation of smart parking and other smart traffic management systems will reach US$277 billion in 2025.

The overwhelming majority of savings attributable to smart traffic management systems will come by way of congestion reduction.

As the tech around artificial intelligence evolves ever faster, surpassing human decision-making in unexpected and perhaps dangerous ways, can industry take accountability for its role in those emerging AI hazards?

A survey from software company Pega canvassing 1,350 C-level executives from around the world looks to find that out. The paper, entitled Future-proof 2025: A look at top tech trends, finds business leaders expecting bad things from AI technology in the near future.

According to the paper, which surveys leaders in financial services, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, telcos and the public sector, business leaders think that a lack of accountability within the private sector likely will lead to governments ‘taking over responsibility’ for AI regulation, all within the next five years.

“All surveyed industries see trouble ahead for AI governance and regulation that do not go far enough.”

“Sixty-five percent of respondents felt external governance was insufficient to manage AI adoption,” says the report.

“All surveyed industries see trouble ahead for AI governance and regulation that do not go far enough.”

According to the survey, the private sector will ‘fail to provide the governance necessary’ to keep artificial intelligence in check, with governments around the world ‘forced to take over within five years’.

So what’s with the feckless attitude to good AI governance? The survey seems to show business leaders seemingly caught between the burdens of regulatory compliance and their own limitations.

Respondents from all industry sectors described the challenges of conforming to GDPR, bank directives and other regulatory frameworks, with 27 percent of respondents saying they have no designated leader in AI governance.

Manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services all reported significant ‘AI governance gaps’ in internal leadership and formal strategies.

“This frustration with external governing frameworks actually reveals their natural limitations,” says the report, “and the urgent need and responsibility for enterprises to step up and create more comprehensive governance frameworks.”

So who should be filling this perceived AI governance leadership void? The public or private sector?

“Though the vast majority (78 percent) of respondents prefer full or equally shared responsibility for regulation, the numbers flip when asked about expectations for five years out, when 75 percent expect the government will be largely or fully responsible for governance, which is clearly far from what respondents feel is the most appropriate balance.

“Whatever the future actually brings, the stakes are high: more than half (53 percent) are concerned that external and/or government regulation will stifle their innovation.”

The research urges businesses to take better control and stronger accountability for the governance, integration, innovation and adoption of emerging technologies so they can better enact change within their organisations.

The New Zealand government has not yet developed an AI strategy, but industry body AI Forum of New Zealand has published a set of guiding principles. Australia has similarly taken a hands-off approach, developing the AI Ethics Framework, a set of voluntary AI Ethics Principles to encourage organisations using AI systems to ‘strive for the best outcomes for Australia and Australians’.

“Trust is central to the widespread acceptance and adoption of AI,” says Nicole Gillespie, professor of management at the University of Queensland.

“However, our research suggests the Australian public is ambivalent about trusting AI systems.”

The survey of over 2,500 Australians in June and July of last year found that, when it comes to developing and using AI systems, Australians had little confidence in commercial organisations to develop and use AI responsibly (37 percent had no or low confidence).

Overwhelmingly (96 percent), Australians expected AI to be regulated and most expected external, independent oversight.

Most Australians (over 68 percent) have moderate to high confidence in the federal government and regulatory agencies to regulate and govern AI in the best interests of the public.

“The nine-to-five workday is dead” wrote Brent Hyder, Salesforce’s president and chief people officer, in a blog post the other day announcing that the company had made its open attitude to working from home permanent.

According to Salesforce, almost half of its employees now want to come in just ‘a few times per month’, so, going forward, staff who don’t need office-time can skip it and work remotely fulltime.

“Remote work strengthens the mandate to digitally monitor worker activity.”

It’s the exciting new work-from-home age, but with employees remote, it can be hard to keep the lines of communication open. So with an increasingly distributed and digital work environment, solutions that support corporate culture – and productivity – are on the rise. According to one reckoning, Employee Experience Platforms (EXP) are on track to hit US$300 billion in annual spend by 2022.

Several offerings have recently hit the market, including Microsoft’s Viva employee experience platform, which was announced earlier this month and is designed to bring tools for ‘employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work’.

Viva uses Microsoft products Teams and Microsoft 365 to create a ‘unified employee experience’ across four key areas – engagement, wellbeing, learning and knowledge – in a way that ‘empowers people to be their best’.

“We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience,” says Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.

“Every organisation will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single, integrated experience directly in Teams.”

Workday is another employee engagement app looking for a piece of the market. The company recently announced the acquisition of Peakon ApS – another enterprise app that measures employee engagement – for an eye-watering US$700 million.

“Never waste a good crisis,” Winston Churchill may have once said, and if there was ever an opportunity for the corporate kraken to latch its slimy tentacles onto the final few remaining corners of free time and space its employees have, it would be now.

But no one likes being tracked, and excessive monitoring is a health hazard. One survey from the Harvard Business Review found that almost half employees subject to stringent monitoring report severe anxiety and are much more likely to suffer from burnout.

A recent UK survey found 12 percent of all firms – and 16 percent of larger firms – had already implemented some form of remote tracking of at-home employees. Slack, Google Workspace and Teams all provide employers with a startling access to their employees.

Microsoft recently had to dial back the level of granularity it provided for the Productivity Score tool for Microsoft 365 after concerns over privacy. (The feature allowed employers to see how often employees engaged with an app over the course of a month).

Is Viva the next step to complete employee transparency? Microsoft says it ain’t so.

“Viva Insights gives individuals, managers and leaders personalised and actionable insights that help everyone in an organisation thrive. Personal experiences and insights, visible only to the employee, help individuals protect time for regular breaks, focused work and learning, as well as strengthen relationships with their colleagues.

“Managers and leaders can see trends at team and organisation level, as well as recommendations to better balance productivity and wellbeing. The insights are aggregated and de-identified by default to maintain personal privacy.”

As for Workday, its new ‘employee success’ acquisition is itself a ‘highly targeted and integrated employee listening strategy’.

As employers grapple with the new work-from-home reality, there will be the temptation to further blur the line between work and home life.

And while there’s a temptation to collect more and more employee data in the name of analysis, it’s worth asking: Does access to things like employee correspondence actually improve productivity? Does it improve culture?

And if employees feel that management is overstepping reasonable boundaries, expect pushback, says Gartner.

“For management cultures that are accustomed to relying on direct observation of employee behavior, remote work strengthens the mandate to digitally monitor worker activity, in some cases via AI,” says Whit Andrews, researchVP at Gartner.

“Just as we’ve seen with every technology aimed at restricting its users, workers will quickly discover the gaps in AI-based surveillance strategies. They may do so for a variety of reasons, such as in the interest of lower workloads, better pay or simply spite.

“IT leaders who are considering deploying AI-enabled productivity monitoring tools should take a close look at the data sources, user experience design and the initial use case intended for these tools before investing,” Andrews says.

“Determine whether the purpose and scope of data collection supports employees doing their best work. For those that do decide to invest, ensure that the technology is being implemented ethically by testing it against a key set of human-centric design principles.”

From the ongoing ravages of a global pandemic catastrophe, to unstable elections, to the new reality of social media dominance, all truly is flux, thank you, Heraclitus.

For business, that uncertainty is a challenge to be managed; enter predictive technologies – tools that can use data patterns to give us a picture of what might be just around the corner.

“The pandemic blew more rigid demand forecasting to pieces.”

The latest on the matter is a survey from Forrester – commissioned by Dataminr – of some 410 global risk and compliance decision-makers across New Zealand, Australia, the US and the UK.

Entitled Risk In A Real-Time World, the report says the Covid-19 pandemic has ‘solely exposed’ how organisations are challenged when anticipating and responding to the unforeseen cascade of short- and long-term market impacts.

“Businesses and societies of today face extreme levels of uncertainty in regard to the threats toward safety, growth, and continuity,” says the report. “This increasingly complex and interconnected landscape of risk spans public health, global financial markets, trade policies, cyberattacks, political unrest, social movements and climate risk.

“While some events simply cannot be predicted, using real-time information (RTI) to better anticipate systemic risk can enhance organisational agility in workflows and enable effective response to drive business resiliency.”

And the survey seems to show a gap between resources and requirements.

“We found that 82 percent of enterprise risk professionals believe having visibility and insights around RTI is more necessary today than ever before,” says the report. “In addition, nearly eight in 10 (77 percent) risk decision-makers plan to leverage more risk management solutions.”

That’s despite the fact that 42 percent of those surveyed are currently ‘improvising’ when it comes to their risk management function, with the majority of those surveyed lacking ‘a holistic understanding of what real-time information really offers’.

Nevertheless, driven by the pandemic-fuelled chaos, more and more businesses are turning to real-time predictive analytics to assess risk and remain competitive.

“Predictive tech and data-driven demand forecasting have never been more important,” says Campbell Brown, CEO and co-founder of Kiwi data intelligence company PredictHQ.

Founded in 2016 by Brown and Robert Kern, PredictHQ provides a data platform that can anticipate fluctuations in demand for products and services by aggregating historical, scheduled and unscheduled event data, factoring in weather, holidays, events, airport delays and global pandemics. PredictHQ then bundles that data into a single API for its customers, who include high-profile brands Uber and Dominos.

“The pandemic blew more rigid demand forecasting to pieces, so sources of demand intelligence went from driving significant competitive advantage to mission critical in helping forecast models to adapt in real time.”

The pandemic was a ‘massive wake up call’ for many businesses, says Campbell, especially for incumbent industry leaders, with many rapidly accelerating to execute on what were 10 year plans, in 12 or even six months.

“Predictive tech is critical for this,” he says. “Many are switching to continuous forecasting to better engage with a highly dynamic situation.

“It’s become clear to many that what they thought was demand prediction was merely a relatively static approach, devoid of understanding how the real-world around them is impacting their operating models.

“In both a recovery and post-Covid world, business can better capture surges in demand to claw back losses incurred during the worst of the black swan event and mitigate against additional negatively impacting events, whether that’s a flood or an attended event needing to be rescheduled or cancelled altogether.”

In response to Covid-19 Campbell says the company has added new tracking functionality, including the ability to track lockdowns and restrictions by city, as well as specific bans on hospitality and leisure venues being open.

“For us Kiwis with a centralised government, and even for many Americans, it can be surprising just how differently each state and even city is responding to the pandemic in the USA,” says Campbell.

The company has also launched its Live TV Events category, the first ever tool that forecasts how many fans will tune into watch a sports game, says Campbell.

“Before our solution it was impossible to make broadcast sporting events part of any forecast model as no one predicted viewership in advance.”

PredictHQ models predicted the Super Bowl viewership with 99.6 percent accuracy – a full two weeks before it actually occurred.

“This provides incredible value to our quick serve restaurant, delivery and grocery customers like Dominos, who were the first to sign up for this.”

Campbell says that businesses can leverage real-time data to better inform their pricing strategies, both in times of demand and excess supply.

That includes Legion, a company which provides forecasting for retail stores in the USA, and Uber, which uses PredictHQ data to ensure they have enough drivers in the right place, at the right time.

“Imagine you run a New Zealand car hire company,” says Campbell. “Knowing a major event is coming up outside of Christchurch means you can ensure you get enough vehicles on hand to meet demand, run targeted marketing campaigns and price and package your vehicles well. If you imagine the impact of one or two companies knowing that, while others are scrambling in the week leading up to it as inquiries roll in, it becomes clear how critical demand predictions are.” And once the pandemic conditions settle, there’s still plenty more value to be unlocked in the data.

“Whether it’s pricing, labour optimisation, inventory management, predictive analytics across anything from coffee shops, Amazon Alexa to destination marketing organisations, the value extracted is multifaceted,” says Campbell.

“Our company grew throughout the pandemic, both in terms of more customers and more revenue. We’re getting more inbound customers than ever, as companies realise that our demand intelligence is one of the very few sources of information that can provide certainty to build plans upon, in uncertain times.”

The Federal Government is currently conducting a review of the Privacy Act 1988, as it seeks to establish whether Australia’s privacy regulation strikes the right balance between commercial interests and consumer protections for the digital age.

The Attorney-General announced the review of the 32 year old Act in December, saying it was now necessary to ‘ensure privacy settings empower consumers, protect their data and best serve the Australian economy’.

The digital economy has brought with it immense benefits including new, faster and better products and services, says the issues paper associated with the review. But with it, new challenges around privacy.

“Small businesses are increasingly handling personal information and may now pose a higher privacy risk than previously.”

“As Australians spend more of their time online, and new technologies emerge, such as artificial intelligence, more personal information about individuals is being captured and processed raising questions as to whether Australian privacy law is fit for purpose.

“At the same time, businesses that are trying to do the right thing are faced with an increasingly complex regulatory environment with respect to managing personal information… This is particularly true for businesses who work across international borders where complying with information protection standards can be a requirement for access to overseas markets.”

On the table are questions around the impact of the country’s notifiable data breach scheme, effectiveness of enforcement powers and mechanisms under the Privacy Act, as well as a discussion of Australia’s 20 year old Privacy Act exemptions for small businesses.

Passed in 2000, the small business exemption was introduced in recognition of the ‘potentially unreasonable compliance costs for certain small businesses’, which were considered to pose little or no risk to the privacy of individuals.

Since then however, several recommendations have called for the removal of the exclusion. In its 2005 report ‘The real Big Brother: Inquiry into the Privacy Act 1988’ the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee argued that the small business exemption should be removed, on the basis that ‘the exemption inconsistently regulates businesses and adds to the complexity of the Act’.

The Government did not agree with that point of view, and noted at the time that the exemption ‘struck the right balance between risk of privacy breaches and regulation’ of small businesses.

Similarly, the ALRC Report 108 from 2008 recommended the removal of the small business exemption too, concluding that its removal would have ‘substantial benefits for the protection of privacy’.

The ALRC also noted that no other comparable jurisdiction (the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada and the European Union) exempts small businesses from the general privacy law.

Now, the Privacy Act Review is examining the exemption anew.

“The exemption was based on the premise that not all private sector organisations pose the same risk to privacy,” says the review’s Issues Paper.

“Many small businesses did not have significant holdings of personal information – they may have held customer records that were used for their own business purposes; however they did not sell or otherwise deal with customer information in a way that posed a high risk to the privacy interests of those customers.

“In the 20 years since the small business exemption was introduced, technology has changed the way that small businesses operate. These advancements may mean that small businesses are increasingly handling personal information and may now pose a higher privacy risk than previously.”

What are the changes likely to be?

At this moment, it’s hard to say for sure, but among the questions posed in the 89-page review document is whether the $3 annual turnover threshold is appropriate for determining a ‘small’ business, and therefore, one exempt from Australia’s Privacy Act framework.

“Is the current threshold appropriately pitched or should the definition of small business be amended? If so, should it be amended by changing the annual turnover threshold from $3 million to another amount, replacing the threshold with another factor such as number of employees or value of assets or should the definition be amended in another way?

“If so, what obligations should be placed on small businesses? What would be the financial implications for small business? Would there be benefits to small business if they were required to comply with some or all of the ? Should small businesses that trade in personal information continue to be exempt from the Act if they have the consent of individuals to collect or disclose their personal information?”

Following a consultation process and review of the submissions, a final report will be released later this year.