 We're here at ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha in the state of Qatar, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Mr Rohit Talwar, who is Chief Executive Officer of Fast Future Research. Rohit, thank you very much for being with us today. My pleasure. I'd like to start off just by asking you a little bit about Fast Future Research, what exactly are you involved with it? We're a research and consulting firm that focuses on helping organisations respond to the disruptive and transformational agenda out there and also create their own future. We do research into what might shape the next five to fifty years. We do consulting to help governments, businesses, NGOs understand those forces and work out how they create the right kind of future for their constituency. And then I do a lot of speaking around the world to leadership audiences to really help them understand what's coming next and how they can respond to it in a positive way rather than a reactive way. Now, the central theme here at ITU Telecom World 2014 is future in focus. I wanted to ask you, what developments in technology, policy or business do you see as key to the near future? I think there are a number of things that are key. The first is the issue of connectivity. We can't talk about data privacy. We can't talk about people having access to, you know, all of these great developments if they don't have technology in the palm of their hands and they're not connected to the internet. So that's the first one and that's got to be a universal priority. It's a universal human right now almost. The second is the rapid advance of really game-changing technologies like artificial intelligence. We're seeing how quickly these systems are evolving that have the capacity to learn and are getting closer in many respects to the capability of humans. Within the next decade, we could well see systems emerge that in certain areas are smarter than humans, learn faster than us and go beyond our understanding. That is something very big for anyone to get their heads around. And then the third one for me that is going to touch us all is the emergence of digital currencies like Bitcoin. There are now over 500 of these and people aren't just using them to pay each other for things. These are being used in a way to reinvent financial services, to eliminate all the middlemen roles, to eliminate all the ways in which profit is normally taken out of the system, to create a much slicker streamlined system that literally has within it the potential to transform the way the economy works, the way financial services works and the way business is financed. So those together are pretty disruptive elements that are coming. Have you got a main message here that you could relay here to ICU telecom participants? Absolutely. I think whether you're in business, you're in government or you're an association or a trade body. The most critical thing now is to make sure that the people in your organization who are charged with shaping strategy, with shaping policy, with laying out the agenda are really very well versed in what's coming next, that they understand the nature of the disruptions happening now. They understand the timeline of technologies that could come in the next 20 years. They understand how those will facilitate new thinking and game-changing ideas. They understand the rapid change in business practices. They understand how education is being transformed, healthcare, everything. Because what you don't want is your strategists and policymakers to be planning for tomorrow based on yesterday. They have to be really well informed. So I think and the work we're doing around the world is helping organizations take those top teams, take groups from across multiple ministries and really kind of take them on a journey to prepare them for tomorrow so that when they come back through some intensive training, intensive learning experiences, they can then come back and really be forward-thinking in terms of what they need to do, but practical in terms of how do we get there from where we are today. And what you see happening then is you get a much faster agenda for development. You also get a more integrated development agenda. So if you take, for example, the reforms happening in education, right now, the pace of change in most countries is nothing like the pace of change on the internet. Today on the internet, I can get free education from kindergarten through to advanced degree. That is bypassing all traditional systems. Governments need to think, well, actually, that's a combination of my telecoms ministry, my technology ministry, my finance ministry, who fund this and my education ministry. They need to work together to create a collective response and they need to be being exposed to the same kind of thinking about what's shaping tomorrow and coming up with common agendas. So that capacity building, that forward-thinking, that learning to think around corners is, to me, the most critical thing governments need to do. And equally, the private sector needs to have leadership that thinks well beyond what it's delivering today to understand what's coming next and how to make that possible. So I think those two have to go hand-in-hand. Very briefly, I know we caught up yesterday after the session where you were a panelist on, but I'd just like to ask you in this context, what single technological development do you think will have the biggest impact in the next five to 10 years? I think, well, I pick on three very quickly. I've already touched on a couple, but I think the rapid rollout of connectivity, fast, reliable, and cheap access to the entire planet will be a massive enabler. The second, I think, is going to be around artificial intelligence, systems that learn and evolve quickly and will perform a whole range of tasks that create a smarter world for us. And then, I think, for me, this whole area of eliminating the boundaries between industries, removing friction, so we're seeing that with digital currencies now, but we'll see that in many areas where we'll see end-to-end solutions being developed that offer a much slicker solution to the end customer. These are going to disrupt sectors like banking. So we'll still have banking in the future, but we may not have the banks that we understand as we understand them today. Well, that's brilliant. Thank you very much. There's some fascinating insights, and thanks for being with us in the studio today. My pleasure. Thank you.