The Era Of Living Services – Accenture Report

Article Synopsis :

“Living Services” is a new term describing how brands will use the Internet of Things to create services that come to life; predicting and reacting to consumers’ changing needs and circumstances. In other words, branded services that are personalized and change in real-time for every individual wherever they are and whatever they’re doing.

‘Living Services’, technology so smart and integrated it will be hard to distinguish where ‘it’ ends and ‘we’ begin

In “The Era Of Living Services”, Fjord, the design and innovation consultancy of Accenture Interactive, takes a stab at how health services, transportation, insurance, utilities and security companies will evolve to meet increasingly liquid demands and expectations in a world where almost everything is digitised. The report envisages how businesses from oil companies to retailers will create entirely new types of customer service or ways of working in the emerging IoT landscape.

The report looks at six specific areas where Living Services figure to have a profound impact:

• Our homes
• Our bodies
• Our finances
• The future of travel
• Our working lives
• Our experience of shopping

The report suggests Living Services will transform business operations leading to the evolution of brands:

1.  A return to personal service, but delivered en masse
2. Businesses will face wholesale structural change
3. Look out for universal service providers
4. Brands will become super-distributed or atomized

At the societal level, Living Services will impact how we live in the following ways:

1. Decisions and diagnoses will be more individualized and accurate
2. We will use our bodies to control technology
3. Living services will raise the stakes around privacy

Living Services raise significant ethical questions. Take insurance premiums for example.  As more individualized real-time information becomes available about our lifestyles and driving habits, is it right for people who drive badly, or have obesity issues to pay higher insurance premiums than good drivers, or thinner, fitter people? These are important issues society as a whole will need to address.

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