"We have to consider how traditional industry can change its perspective and move towards an integration with the digital world that will help it increase productivity, competitiveness and discover new lines of business," said the Minister of Industry, Energy and Mining (MIEM), Carolina Cosse, in her presentation at Somos Uruguay: 'How industry is changing the world and the impact of new technologies'.
In his opinion, in the face of this challenge, Uruguay must recognise in the present the traces of the future that "has already arrived". The usual relationship between the ICT industry and the traditional industry was one of supply, but the time has come to reflect on their integration, he said.
In that sense: "Information technologies have great competitive advantages in Uruguay and, if we change the perspective and instead of supplying these services we integrate them into traditional operations, we can discover new businesses," the minister added. Among them, she mentioned facial recognition, text recognition, automatic translation, diagnosis of pathologies through images, GPS-guided machinery and others.
"In addition, we have to be prepared because jobs and the way of working will change. One example is teleworking, which is a tool, but, above all, the most important sign will be a strong results orientation and flexibility in work organisation," he argued.
"Speed must be responded to with collaboration, the sophistication of technology must be responded to with collective educational actions that form us into a technologically strong country, with workers who can design, produce, operate and repair sophisticated machinery," he stressed.
Communication and integration
Regarding the speed of change, he explained that an example of this is to remember what happened several decades ago when a company considered "huge" was one that was 100 years old. Today, however, the best known digital companies in the world are no more than 20 years old. "It is not natural to think that the biggest are the youngest. This is also a change in the way of thinking and in the reality of the world, which shows us the speed of change. That's why communication and integration between the traditional and ICT industries is important," Cosse said.
The minister participated in the "Línea de encuentro" cycle organised by Somos Uruguay at the Sheraton Montevideo hotel, together with the president of the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technology (Cuti), Leonardo Loureiro; the founder of Bantotal, Mariano de Larrobla, and the co-founder of Tryolabs and Monkey Learn, Martín Alcalá.
Source: La República
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