October 2021 | Brian Barbetta, Global Industry Analyst; Yash Patodia, Global Industry Analyst; Bruce Glazer, Global Industry Analyst
Tech WELLcovered: Life stages fulfilled
Innovations like artifical intelligence (AI), machine learning, and genomic sequencing help make big life decisions less daunting by bringing clarity to decision making. Join us on a journey to witness the past, experience the present, and choose a more fulfilling future — all while harnessing the investable opportunities tech creates.
The views expressed are those of the authors at the time of writing. Other teams may hold different views and make different investment decisions. The value of investments may become worth more or less than at the time of original investment. While any third-party data used is considered reliable, its accuracy is not guaranteed. For professional, institutional, or accredited investors only.
In part one of Tech WELLcovered, we explored how tech is augmenting work and unlocking our true creative potential. In part two, we profiled how tech disruption is evolving how we have fun, creating vast possibilities for experiences tailored to our interests. Here, we highlight how innovation is helping you control your own destiny with improved guidance for every life stage.
How may AI help you?
Navigating new life stages — like education, relationships, health care, and retirement — has long been filled with uncertainty. In the past, you may have sought guidance from friends or relatives on the best path forward, read self-help books, or scoured the internet. But this advice was rarely data-driven and often not suited to your individual needs, making it challenging to chart a clear path to achieving your goals.
Today, in every life stage and across industries, tech innovations like AI and machine learning are harnessing big data to offer personalized insights and assistance to everyone. This progress reduces unknowns by using hard data to overcome human error and anecdotal inconsistency, boosting your probability of success by enabling you to make more-informed decisions.
KEY POINTS
Tech is helping you navigate future life stages with far fewer unknowns. Innovations like AI, machine learning, and genomic sequencing offer you the foresight to make well-informed choices that enhance the probability of fulfilling your full potential.
The investable opportunity sets fueling such progress span every industry, including companies in the financial services, health care, and consumer tech sectors leveraging AI, machine learning, cloud computing, and/or genomic sequencing technologies.
As these innovations offer enormous breadth and depth of investable opportunities, we think investors need to draw on a wide range of research resources to future-proof their portfolios.
Let tech be your guide
Take health care, for instance, which was primarily reactive in the past. Today, innovations offer proactive medical insights, enabling you to take control of your health care journey. For example, genomic sequencing at birth, for cancer patients, and even for healthy adults could soon be the standard of care, allowing for preventative and personalized medical treatments. In addition, wearable medical devices like smart watches or clothing and household items like smart mirrors or toilets will help monitor your health on an ongoing basis. The widespread investment opportunities these innovations present span biopharma companies, genetics-based diagnostics firms, sequencing equipment companies, and medical device manufacturers and supply chains.
Importantly, technology’s potential for diagnostic guidance reaches far beyond health care. The need to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences, and other impactful information to help optimize outcomes is applicable across every industry and life stage.
We’re excited about the compelling opportunities we see from today’s rapid innovation in personal finance data analytics. This progress was made possible by the shift to cloud computing from the inefficient, on-premises technology that has incumbered many financial services firms for decades.
— Bruce Glazer, Global Industry Analyst
One company is leveraging machine learning to analyze its customers’ finances and offer bespoke, data-driven advice — like how best to get out of debt or which bills to pay off first to improve credit scores. By also using cloud computing, it can run billions of predictive models for its clients each day2. Similarly, robo-advisors increasingly harness these innovations to provide financial planning with guidance customized for your particular goals — from saving for your child’s college education to preparing for retirement to buying a vacation home.
AI is also offering unique insights into relationships, aiming to make finding a partner slightly less of a leap of faith. Though often overlooked as an investable area, online dating is an innovative and fast-growing industry (Figure 1). One major online dating company is harnessing big data to help match prospective partners that are best suited to each other, adjusting its algorithms based on each individual’s characteristics, preferences, and ongoing actions on its mobile app. In the future, not only will data-driven matching offer increasingly suitable partners from more in-depth personal data but dating companies could also use this data to help plan ideal dates based on your shared interests, your city’s available options, and your budget.
Data represents global dating app revenue. Data from 2015 to 2020 sourced from Blackstone, IAV, and Statista. Data projections from 2021 to 2025 sourced from eMarketer, Toptal, and Statista.
The benefits (and drawbacks) of big data
The future will likely see companies combine data across your education, career, health, finances, and personal life. This will help offer synergistic, personalized guidance on how best to fulfill your aspirations and enable increasingly proactive and impactful decision making. For example, if genomic testing shows you are likely to require specific medical treatment in the future, a financial planning company may suggest ways to save enough to cover the related costs based on your finances. A career advisor may even propose new, higher-earning job opportunities based on your educational and career backgrounds.
While data-driven foresight has its merits, it has also raised privacy concerns. Companies will have huge repositories of personal data, including sensitive health and financial information. Data privacy and security will therefore continue to be key areas of risk, potential regulation, and consumer advocacy. The regulatory effort aims to ensure that customers retain control of their sensitive personal information and benefit from the resulting insights (and opportunities) made possible by this new technology, while mitigating the associated risks.
Witnessed. Experienced. Fulfilled.
Untangling uncertainty is a lifelong challenge. Fortunately, companies are harnessing data-driven insights to help us navigate every life stage — creating limitless investable opportunities, spanning across supply chains, high-performance chips, cloud computing, software, and professional services.
Notably, these technologies don’t just give individuals the foresight to potentially fulfill their aspirations. They can also do predictive analytics on a larger scale — possibly helping to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems — such as health care inequality, energy efficiency, and other ESG issues.
As tech’s use cases rapidly expand across industries, we think investors need to keep an open mind to the opportunities, cast a wide net, and take advantage of deep research capabilities. Is your tech exposure ready to capture this potential?
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