Service Innovation Futures: Tomorrow’s Technology, Today’s Strategy

by Jan-Simon Veicht

Jan-Simon Veicht is a Lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology and a Design Fellow at the Jacobs Center for Design Innovation. He is also a Startup mentor at INNOVIT San Francisco, fostering human-centered design within the Italian Innovation and Culture Hub. He also serves as the Head of Design at Schoolab, a global innovation studio based in San Francisco, where he leads strategic foresight consulting projects. Jan is an Ambassador for the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP) and works at the intersection of design, innovation, and technology.

Service Innovation Futures: Tomorrow’s Technology, Today’s Strategy

To paraphrase Ray Kurzweil, technological progress, particularly in artificial intelligence, drives an eventual merger between humans and machines. Whether we reach the singularity in 5, 10, 20 years, or more, this evolution will make us more intelligent and creative and enable us to live longer, becoming better versions of ourselves. Regardless of your personal beliefs as a reader about the singularity, one thing is undeniable: innovation has significantly improved most of our lives, especially in Western societies. It has enhanced our products, experiences, and, fundamentally, our services. This progress has made services more accessible and beneficial to societies worldwide.

Contextualizing service innovations within this framework of today versus tomorrow, designing for better services and products should still put delightful experiences at the core of any concept. It seems that we have entered an even more rapidly evolving technological era of “current and coming marvels.” Where do we pause, remind ourselves, and refocus on the human condition? Service innovation is a pivotal arena where technology and strategic design intersect and where we want to critically examine how the services of tomorrow are conceptualized, delivered, and experienced. Central to this transformation is the use and interaction with Generative AI models and digital twins and the emerging concept of Agentic AI ecosystems – interconnected networks of AI agents that can autonomously interact, learn, and make decisions to achieve complex goals. This article explores how traditional service design ideas can adapt to these advancements, offering a perspective on how we can ideate from the impossible to the improbable and act on ideas from the possible to the preferable.

Service design has traditionally focused on creating systems and processes that optimize interactions between service providers and customers. By adhering to user-centered design and co-creation principles, service design ensures that services are intuitive, effective, and engaging. Incorporating methodologies like strategic foresight—anticipating and preparing for future challenges and opportunities—can elevate service innovation by shifting from reactive measures to proactive, data-driven strategies that automate and predict future needs and preferences. Generative AI can significantly aid this process by uncovering trends, identifying needs, highlighting pain points, and providing deeper insights to shape innovative services. Historically, service (design) innovation was about direct, human-centered interactions, emphasizing understanding and meeting users’ immediate needs. As digital tools became more prevalent, the scope of service design expanded, allowing designers and practitioners to adhere to users’ local and global challenges and adapt services to diverse cultural and economic contexts. This international perspective is particularly relevant today and tomorrow (and more than ever) as businesses seek to scale their service and operations, growing their customer base in varied markets with differing expectations and requirements. In the meantime, real-time data analytics and feedback loops have already reshaped the foundation of service delivery within the last few decades.

These tools have allowed service designers to create more adaptive and responsive systems that can evolve based on continuous user input. In the near future, we may finally see the integration of IoT devices in home automation services at scale, enabling providers to automatically adjust functionalities to suit individual preferences, learning and adapting to each user’s habits and environmental conditions in real-time. This evolution from a static to a dynamic, learning-focused approach in service will lead to a significant shift towards more personalized and anticipatory service experiences. With these individualized and fluid interfaces, we will see a close-knit overlap with personal, digital twin technology. Digital twins are virtual replicas of physical spaces and environments that run simulations before actual designs are built and deployed. Additionally, we can think of digital twins as digital avatars—virtual copies of individuals that ideally act, react, and interact as the real-life person would. Unsurprisingly, generative AI has advanced this field at a head-spinning speed in recent months and years.

The potential applications of digital twins seem infinite. In healthcare, they could revolutionize patient care through personalized treatment simulations. In education and training, they could create risk-free environments for skill development. In human resources, we might see digital twins playing a role in preliminary job screenings, though this raises critical ethical questions about fairness and human involvement in hiring processes. While some of these applications may seem far-fetched, they underscore the transformative potential of digital twins across various sectors. Think of a digital twin as a real-time image of ourselves, which will allow the emergence of better service futures at scale in terms of the true essence of the word–serving people. The examples above merely scratch the surface of the possibilities, but they remind us of the delightfulness we want to build into our products and services surrounding such interactions and experiences. At the bottom line, new technologies should enhance service delivery efficiency and significantly elevate personalization and responsiveness, thus reshaping user expectations and interactions in the best way possible for the individual user.

Challenges and Considerations

Integrating advanced technologies in service innovation is challenging despite the preferable benefits described above. Issues such as data privacy, digital accessibility and inclusion, plus displacement of jobs at large must be seriously addressed. While personalization enhances user experience, it still raises concerns about consumer data usage and security. To point to the healthcare example from earlier, while digital twins offer customized patient care, they rely on accurate and available patient data sets, which must be handled with the utmost confidentiality. Manufacturing, automation, and simulation increase efficiency and raise questions about human workers’ future and the need for new skills training. So, the overarching impact of these technologies on user experience is transformative, providing significant opportunities and formidable challenges. However, as industries adopt these technologies and companies offer services like digital twinning and Agentic AI, they must also consider their broader societal and ethical implications, ensuring that service innovation advances enhance individual and collective well-being. As these technologies advance, they bring about significant ethical challenges and the need for robust regulatory frameworks. Let’s think of the prospect of AI making autonomous decisions (as a digital twin) that impact other human lives. It requires an even more careful design process to avoid biases and ensure fairness. And we are not ready yet, I think.

As service design advances, it must balance technological innovation and human-centric values. Engaging stakeholders from diverse backgrounds in the design process will be crucial to understanding and addressing the broad impacts of new technologies. There is incredible promise here, but as with any other technology, there is also an insurmountable pull toward the dark side if used with the wrong intent. We must remain vigilant about these technologies’ social, ethical, and practical implications. By fostering a dialogue that includes technologists, ethicists, artists, and the broader public, we can ensure that tomorrow’s service innovations enrich the human experience.

Service innovation is fundamentally about people – those creating and using the service. Successful new services should fulfill basic human needs because we all desire happiness, convenience, and a sense of belonging. The objective can be as straightforward as delighting your customers. If your services aren’t meeting their needs, they become merely transactional. It is good to remind ourselves that innovation is not a one-time project but an ongoing process. Continually nurturing and trusting this process will result in gradual and significant improvements.

Note to Readers: This article is Part 1 of a three-part series exploring the future of service design innovation. Over the coming weeks, we will explore how cutting-edge technologies reshape our interactions and service experiences. The series will culminate in an event that brings together industry leaders to discuss these themes in detail.

Blog Post AI Image Prompt: Watercolor, artistic, abstract representation of the future of service design with advanced technologies. Streams of glowing data flow between ethereal human silhouettes and abstract technological forms, symbolizing human-AI interaction. Incorporate bioluminescence and holographic effects for a futuristic feel