"Things are going digital"

Maybe not, but hey it’s a discussion board so what fun is agreeing with each other all the time. :smiley:

I base my opinion on my extended social network, the companies and teams they work for, general job searches and my own general consumer habits. Keep in mind I am not saying all objects are being replaced by apps, I view the term digital as anything that could have a digital footprint. A Citibike has a physical product, an app, and service as an example - I still consider it a digital product, otherwise it’s just a bike you steal and give back.

Between IoT trends, analog devices become more and more connected, and many of the new spaces which emerge are all some form of hybrid between a purely analog and “just an app”. I order my kitty litter by talking to a robot speaker, my son wears a smart bootie while sleeping to measure his respiration, and I even just got rid of my remote control and cable box in place of a phone and a chromecast.

At this point almost everyone I know in the ID world is touching the tech sector in some way, the few that aren’t are in more mild mannered design fields like packaging which won’t ever go away. Many have pivoted to UX including myself, and several lost or left their ID jobs.

It’s a similar discussion to the one people have around automation “OMG Robots” - no every job won’t be replaced by robots, but it’s obviously a rapidly growing trend that will be disruptive for a non trivial percentage of the workforce over the next 20 years. The same way we’ve watched giants of industry like Motorola, Kodak, IBM all dissolve their hardware product operations and massively scaled design operations. I’ve also seen a number of smaller consultancies that I used to work with close up operations, pivot or only be able to stay relevant by focusing on specific niches that they were deeply invested.

It’s not to say the end is neigh, but to say it isn’t a clear trend would seem to ignore most of the evidence that I see from where I’m sitting. You’ve got a long standing career in a broad range of industries, many of which weren’t tied to tech - so I can appreciate that many of those areas may remain unfazed, or their digital operations scaled unrelated to their ID staff.