Article authored by Fábio Olyntho, originally published in SAPO TeK

In 1980 our day-to-day life was very different - traveling, for example. To do so you'd have to carry a paper address book, a wallet with a good amount of coins, a heavy street guide, a camera with rolls of film, and notebooks for notes. A single bag wouldn't be enough, and all information was obtained in slow mode and highly fragmented. But here we are, practically in 2020.

I was recently in San Francisco, at Dreamforce19, Salesforce's big innovation event. It's almost an awakening to be surrounded by so many people with digital-life habits. These new beings are the Airpod generation and all have Apple's Bluetooth earbuds in their ears. They live a frictionless life.

Having no friction means living in a single environment whether on or offline, in both their personal and professional lives. An environment with no latency, where everything flows without interruption. This cycle will be complete with the adoption of 5G.

For the Airpod generation, communication happens offline and online with the same fluidity. After all, it's them, not their phones, that are connected to the internet. They shop at Amazon Go stores without needing to go through a checkout, they move around wherever they want with access to multiple mobility options, from scooters to airplanes, they solve their problems through web communities and chatbots, they receive, through the artificial intelligence already present in their devices, various suggestions and alerts, and they already control every feature of their home from afar. The internet connected us, and the mobile phone gave access to APIs, enabling an immense number of features to what was before "just" a human.

In the business world this was still a very distant scenario until 1999, the year two visionaries, Marc Benioff and Parker Harris, founded Salesforce, a pioneering B2B cloud platform company. In 20 years the evolution is remarkable, and today, at its biggest global conference, the CRM platform presented solutions for a fully frictionless context.

The Salesforce platform delivers a single view of the customer, through Customer 360. Through the integration cloud, Mulesoft, it's possible to connect much of the market's systems, such as SAP, Servicenow, Workday, and many others, without needing a single line of code. Beyond this, a company can create its own APIs and distribute them through a webpage.

Take the case of BMW, which connected its service area. It extended this to all its dealers and vehicle service networks, and to its customers' records. When calling a service center, the representative already knows in real time which vehicle it is, its features, its condition, whether it has a fault, which service centers are closest to that customer's home and workplace, and can offer a fully customized service.

With everything connected, imagine the amount of information available to companies serving the Airpod generation. Big data without any analysis would be useless. To solve this came Einstein, the artificial intelligence that handles the entire Business Intelligence area, analyzing data and delivering predictive analysis, helping through probabilistic analysis to detect future problems across every cloud. The platform has also evolved on billing, and can now be connected to various payment methods.

The Airpod generation wants to buy on and offline with the same fluidity, and today they can do so with systems such as Salesforce's Commerce Cloud. It connects in-store, website, and catalog experiences. It's multichannel and, more importantly, personalized based on social media preferences and views, the products most visited on the site, and recent purchases.

Many companies already live this reality, adapted to the Airpod generation. After all, we don't live without our phones, without being connected, and without having fluid experiences. Today, the greatest value is the consumer experience.

It shouldn't take long for this impact to become massive across businesses: many of those that fail to adapt will cease to exist. It's inevitable. Now imagine it with 5G - but that's a conversation for another day.