Marc Andreessen, the famous VC from Andressen-Horowitz, published an article in the Wall Street Journal on Why Software is Eating the World. In the last two decades, digital startups have disrupted many large industries including retail, media and transportation. The increasing pace of automation and digitization is only increasing the rate of this digital disruption.

Most traditional businesses today face an existential threat — the threat of being eaten by software. Digital Transformation, or DX for short, is how they counter this threat and create strategic opportunities. Walmart's online store or Comcast's content distribution platforms are initiatives towards a digital transformation of their traditional businesses.

Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), especially those in the B2B service industry, have a unique opportunity to undertake digital transformation. Recent developments in technology such as affordable cloud computing, the growing API economy and public availability of Artificial Intelligence technologies have made it very affordable for SMBs to experiment with digitization. At LambdaZen, we partner with SMBs to implement their digital transformations strategies.

So, how can SMBs identify DX initiatives? At LambdaZen, we see two patterns:

1. Developing new software products with existing know-how: Every B2B business has a good amount of institutional domain knowledge to understand and properly serve its customers. In many cases, this domain knowledge can be turned into revenue-generating software products such as enterprise applications and customer-facing BI portals .
2. Optimizing existing offerings through digital automation: Most service businesses can leverage crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence to optimize their internal processes and workflows. The right automation platforms with built-in quality controls can ensure that the quality of the work-output is the same, if not better than the original process.

We would love to collaborate with you to identify and implement DX initiatives.