Articles
Digital Economy: The Rise of the Intelligent Enterprise: Twenty years later
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Ubiquity
Volume 2025, Number October (2025), Pages 1-6
Ubiquity Symposium: Digital Economy: The Rise of the Intelligent Enterprise: Twenty years later
Kemal A. Delic, Umeshwar Dayal
DOI: 10.1145/3772190
We have predicted the emergence of Intelligent Enterprises, which will spawn a digital economy, impact societal structure and behaviors, and mark the beginning of the sixth technology epoch, dominated by the spread of cognitive systems—AI-augmented tools and systems.
In this updated version, we are revisiting what we have been right or wrong about intelligent enterprise and project the appearance of the transformed enterprise within sixth technology wave substantiating the contemporary digital economy. We also re-confirm the importance of artificial intelligence (AI), discuss new developments for intelligent enterprise, highlight the currently dominating cloud infrastructure that is fitting predicted enterprise organization structures, single out important features of deployed technologies, and conclude with what we believe will happen in the next 20 years.
Trying to answer what's the state of intelligent enterprise today, we reassert that the capability of "accelerated adaptation" remains key to enterprises morphing into a "better, more efficient form" via the extremely complex process of enterprise transformation. We remain convinced that the companies we call intelligent enterprises will impact the shape of the global economy and transform societies for better or worse. Bets are on.
The Rising Tide of AI
More than 20 years ago, we guessed well that the field of AI would seed major technological developments and advances—from automatons in ancient times, via mechanical animals and dolls, to modern industrial automation deploying robots and the emergence of military drones.
We framed AI as the key to the rise of intelligent enterprise, stressed the importance of AI, predicted correctly the appearance of several devices and services, and sketched the future impact of AI on society and the economy.
We have been surprised by the explosion of interest in generative AI as the tipping point in the history of AI technologies. We anticipate the rise of AI agents opening the new, potentially historic, role in human-AI collaboration.
We have also seen a recent explosion of interest in generative AI and large language models (LLM), which we believe will further spread into expanding the variety of edge devices and systems. AI technologies will play the key role in interconnecting, orchestrating, and cooperating a wide variety of edge devices, from gaming devices to scientific and medical instruments. We predict the rise of "edge intelligence" and profusion of small language models (SLM) into "intelligent" edge. We will see them as the sensory extension of the enterprise clouds and fundamental structure of the intelligent enterprise.
On Hyperscale Fabrics/Infrastructure
We previously described in a much more detailed manner the technologies behind intelligent enterprise within the page of Intelligent Enterprise Magazine as knowledge-based customer support, active enterprise analytics, business cockpits, and more. We also articulated a useful view of AI research as complex systems research—bringing yet another view into architectural concepts.
Our structural outline of the business enterprise (see Fig. 1, left) foretold the actual cloud-dominated architectures of contemporary business enterprises (see Fig. 1, right). New technologies enabled unprecedented scale of operations for emerging global corporations.
In the original article we did not address the cybersecurity aspect of IE, assuming that this would be part of "enterprise intelligence" and thus deserving of separate treatment. Also, we did not predict the rise and domination of the social media infosphere, playing an important role in politics, economy and society at large.
Trillion Dollar Companies
Looking back, we indicated fourth and fifth technology waves (see Fig. 2, left) describing with a single word the principal aim of dominant technology: automation/integration and optimization/adaptation. We also named some companies that marked the previous epochs (Ford, Boeing, Amazon, etc.). Now we are pointing to transformation as the best, single word to describe the current market/business/technology reality. Some of the fifth wave companies (like Apple and Microsoft) are perhaps the best representative of the IE sixth wave (see Fig. 2, right).
Observing the current market situation, we argue that seven corporations together surpassing an $18 trillion market valuation have consistently exhibited the features indicated in Figure 2. Intelligent enterprises are accurately sensing market mood/sentiment, guessing well future market/technology directions and positioning itself for the future challenges. They are also able to execute accurate internal re-skilling and organizational/structural changes (structural adaptation).
The Sixth Wave-Cognitive Systems
We will now describe the sixth wave, which we believe will be identified and confirmed in the next 20 years, which we call transformation epoch—likely changes during the long three epochs of agriculture> industrial> information age developments and advances. We observe a shortened cycle of technology change over a period of 10 years, which we could also call Rule-of-Ten on technology acceleration as seen over the last 250 years or quarter of millennia.
For the next epoch of the intelligent enterprise, we predict three principal challenges that we call 3E: energy, environments and ethics. As the training of LLMs create huge energy consumption, questions will be posed about gigantic energy infrastructures and their impact on the environment regarding water cooling systems and the exploitation of primary sources of energy. As we envision the new era of human-AI collaboration, a better understanding of the ethical side of this collaboration would be an unavoidable future topic.
We are expanding upon the table published by The Economist in 20011 (Fig. 3, left) with the forthcoming sixth wave of the emerging technologies (Fig. 3, right). We believe this wave will take some 20 years to happen. Beside the already existing cloud, IoT infrastructure and AI morphing together into "continuum computing fabrics" on the edge, we notice the rise of a variety of drones used in military operations and the consumer drones servicing customers. On the horizon, we predict the emergence and practical uses of quantum computing, sensing, communication and security. Theoretical foundation of quantum phenomena was established a long time ago, while choices of technology and pragmatic effort to create quantum computers is an ongoing affair.
It will be useful to study the "intelligent edge" seen perhaps as a hyperscale cyber-physical system, leading to better understanding how to architect, design, and engineer distinctive hyperscale, heterogeneous, hybrid ecosystems.
In conclusion, we would like to stress the important role of scientific advances via infusion of AI methods, devices, and systems augmenting scientist reasoning power, accelerating scientific discoveries, and amplifying practical uses. As always, scientific discoveries and inventions will spawn new technologies as the fundamental base for economic renewal and growth.
Authors
Kemal A. Delic is a senior visiting research fellow at the Centre for Complexity and Design at the Open University. He is the co-founder of AI-Inc, Ltd. and a lecturer at the University of Grenoble and the University of Sarajevo. He is an advisor and expert evaluator to the European Commission. He previously held positions as a senior enterprise architect and senior technologist and scientist at Hewlett-Packard.
Umeshwar Dayal is a Senior Fellow at Hitachi America, Ltd., R&D Division, Santa Clara, California. Prior to joining Hitachi, Umesh was an HP Fellow and Director of the Information Analytics Lab at Hewlett-Packard Labs, Palo Alto, California. He previously held positions at Digital Equipment Corporation's Cambridge Research Lab, Xerox Advanced Information Technology, and Computer Corporation of America; and he was on the faculty at the University of Texas-Austin. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and has received the Edgar F. Codd Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Management (SIGMOD) for fundamental contributions to data management.
Footnotes
1https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2001/09/22/a-crunch-of-gears
Figures
Figure 1. Intelligent enterprise cloud architecture—then and now.
Figure 2. The age of (ongoing) transformation.
Figure 3. The sixth wave of the future.
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