Atrium promises to be the professional expedition of a lifetime. As with any meaningful expedition, the success foundations are years in the making; a shared sense of purpose will define our ultimate success, and the experience itself will be magnified by the personalities of those along with us for the ride. As we get going in early 2018, several characteristics of our expedition are going to make for a captivating journey.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) market feels like the Wild West. Mountain-sized expectations, driverless cars, algorithms that demolish humans in games like chess, and natural language processing with Amazon / Alexa all dominate the headlines. These are all interesting topics. However, at Atrium, we are captivated by how AI will define the next incarnations of the customer experience ecosystem and create a $1+ Trillion opportunity for our customers in the near term. On equal footing, we are also fascinated by the career-defining opportunities that will emerge for those in our profession. Rather than practitioners spending a career focused on incremental process improvements for clients, they will have the tools to deliver 100X outcomes. The quality of work will be dramatically upgraded for those in the profession who adapt.
Consulting leadership in the customer experience/CRM market is going to be defined by math and data analysis skills combined with industry expertise. For example, it will no longer be about sending in legions of consulting teams chartered with documenting business pain points and “as-is” process documentation in search of technology solutions. Rather, leadership in the market will be defined by firms that can help companies mine existing enterprise data stores as an enabler for AI. Global Systems Integrators will need to retool their service supply chains thereby creating tons of opportunities for upstart firms (like Atrium) to make a big splash. Similar to how Cloud Computing disrupted the consulting market, AI is going to present similar challenges to incumbent firms. New modes of working, skill retooling, rapidly evolving AI technology platforms and changes in the mindset of the consulting buyer are just a few things that will be turned upside down. The window of opportunity is wide open.
As a part of our journey, Atrium has the opportunity to create a new type of consulting firm that fuses together the best elements of math, programming, consulting, and industry expertise. We will be combining professions that historically don’t work together. Converging these fields of expertise and pointing them at delivering 100x outcomes for our customers is going to make for a wild ride. We are our own map makers in this journey. Exploring these new frontiers with a world-class team is going to be thrilling.
