Businesses facing digital transitions

Digital penetration raises new challenges for businesses. Digital technology has encouraged the emergence of innovative models, challenging the positions of existing companies, accelerating innovation and the arrival of new services. It also accelerates the tertiarisation of the economy by replacing certain material productions with the production of services. It sometimes radically changes the way old industries operate. Digital technologies are based on the combination of large amounts of data and algorithms: the winning models are those that manage to quickly reach a critical size, which allows their algorithm to perform better by using more data, and thus to offer a better service, attracting even more users. These network effects, which are characteristic of digital platforms, explain the formation of large players, sometimes posing a competitive risk to the functioning of markets. Digital technologies therefore give rise to potential sources of conflict between the preservation of competition and innovation, raising new questions for public authorities, and in particular for competition authorities. These are the issues at stake for businesses and for the functioning of markets that will be explored by the speakers at the round table.