Traditional systems are slow even when they don't need to be, and this reality directly leads to higher operations costs for businesses.
Time, as often noted, is the most valuable resource that an excess of it leads to higher value output whereas the lack of it, directly leads to increased costs.
Usually when we talk about time usage, we're inclined to look at rewards of its consumption from both the short term and the long term. The purpose of this frequent comparison is generally to determine if short-term expense is compensated for, in excess, in the long-term.
When it comes to businesses, usually, we can look at varying sets of data and come to a conclusion that the long-term rewards are worth it, but this assessment is often if we ignore how much more connected systems are affected by the expense of said time.
For instance, the time cost of businesses functioning on traditional systems goes far beyond company revenues — which is usually where we focus our attention — and into areas such as lost wages and generally economic value.
A 3 days delay in payments settlement for example can have immediate individual and economic costs.
It can create debts, it can cost lives, it can cost lost wages, and certainly will cost economic value flow. The last past is most certainly questionable when we consider that expanding debt directly benefits the economy because said economy is actually designed to expand, on debt, at the expense of the mass population.
However, the flaw in this line of thought lies in the avoidance of factoring in the constraints in livelihood acquiring debt can have in the term leading up to debt maturing. Debtors will generally have to cut down on spending, greatly scale down a lot of money-related expense in their lives and this hurts the generation of economic value and not to mention, well, tax revenues — a pyrrhic victory, yeah?
That said, beyond flaws associated with finance, regulatory and legal systems, we have the flaws of data management systems, that even with traditional digital solutions, often include slow processes, essentially holding back businesses from operating more efficiently.
Programmable smart contracts and AI in business
Greatly reducing the time it takes to accomplish a task is very important to bringing businesses to peak efficiency.
If what would generally cost $1,000 now costs $0.50 due to more timely execution, then revenue goes through the roof for businesses, wages grow valuable as debt creation slows throughout the system.
Most of what is involved with legal, and regulatory requirements can all be automated on-chain. If you think about it, compliance filing does not imply that the government is sure that a business is indeed compliant, it's merely a process that just makes a business bound to legal consequences if provided data is found false at some point.
So why should the government care beyond providing a system that allows all the necessary information to be more efficiently filed and processed?
Smart contracts will be essential in establishing systems that automates these processes, thereby making business operations from starts to ongoing processes smooth and flexible.
The future we are effectively looking at is one where a business can be thought of today and it becomes registered and operational within minutes, unless of course it involves factors that require human inspections but this, however, still doesn't quite take away the fact that a system powered by smart contracts would take away the time costs of traditional systems when it comes to legal and regulatory processes businesses have to pass through.
Moving on, in addition to smart contracts, artificial intelligence will play a huge role in data management in businesses. Why waste human hours collecting and analyzing data when AI systems can do that and deliver outputs that smart contracts can verify the accuracy of said data?
The benefits of having everything on-chain is that the provability of data becomes a factor of efficiency in businesses. If the data is just there, verifiable by a transaction ID in a specific block of data validated by incentivized nodes on-chain, analysis becomes much easier and so much time, and essentially cost, is saved.