The ADOS Digerati is ushering in an era of economic enlightenment for entrepreneurs worldwide. The traditional line-of-thought among so-called black economic empowerments is this antiquated imaginary “Black Main Street” of black-owned merchants lined among a commercial strip.  However, African-Americans have always been leaders of future-facing trends and line of thoughts and innovators and scientists and disrupters – so how we approach black economics will be reflected on future shaping of digital paradigms and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

The future of black-owned businesses and ventures will be based in the cloud with established services that become machine smart through digital collectivism to help black businesses, black communities and black people thrive with efficiency and scalability. In this article, we are going to expand on the elements of how the future of black-owned businesses will operate with tools from The Manufactured Solution platform. 

The Mobile-First Paradigm

In hyper-urban areas throughout Asia in China and Japan, people conduct most of their activities through their mobile phones – the African-American community is no different. Most business models can be created by leveraging the processing power of their customers mobile phones. Ridesharing such as Uber for example uses the mobile phones of both the driver and the passenger instead of providing their own hardware. 

However, super-apps also known as “digital lifestyle apps” are platforms accommodating multiple forms of transactions and functions businesses can take advantage of. Examples of digital lifestyle apps are WeChat and AliPay in China where mobile users can order food, purchase goods, communicate and send payment to peers and more. In order to facilitate the future of black-owned businesses launching their business a digital lifestyle app, entrepreneurs can take advantage of Kossier multi-function mobile-first platform for the following services. 

Identity. Black-owned businesses can create services based on the identity of the Kossier user address. Examples are club memberships, seat reservations and loyalty services, check-in and check-out plus queue overhead displays such as barbershop waiting lists, food takeout ready status and more. 

Messaging. People can send short messages to other people and other businesses. The message can be a conversation or a command. There is even bot-to-bot messaging where a business low on inventory can send a message to a distributor to resupply on net 30 terms. 

Transactions. Kossier use natural language commands that can be interpreted by bots to facilitate the request. For example, to subscribe to Dream and Hustle, a user scan a QR code, approve a command request in Kossier where a payment is process and activation is facilitated by a bot. This same service can be used for point-of-sale operations where retail stores and service establishments can just use QR codes to process appointments, make payments and more within the community. 

Tracking. Delivery services can be created to track assets as they move through points or through a supply chain. People and businesses can track when a product is shipped, can track when a drink is coming to their table at the club, can track if a rental luxury bag has been shipped. 

Virtualized Ecosystem. Black communities do not need to be physically together in the 21st century. Communities and events can be virtualized through interests filtering based on the black person personal preferences – this is how the real black community works. Profiles and related profiles can be curated to a mobile user as recommendations and favorites to shop where they want – this obsolete the so-called generic “black directory/guides” apps which genericized the black lifestyle experience. 

So with Kossier, entrepreneurs can leverage a digital lifestyle app to create new paradigms of ventures such as delivery services, pop-up shops, document processing, rental and membership models where the customer mobile phone runs most of the processing power and the entrepreneur focus on the core product or service. 

Leveraging Shared Cloud Services 

One of the biggest contributors to black-owned businesses failure is everybody is running their business in a vacuum and isolated silo.  As a result, black-owned businesses repeat the same mistakes others encountered because information is not being shared or learned from. The cost of business services such as accounting can eat into the profit margin of a black-owned business as well. These pain points can be greatly reduced by using shared resources on a cloud with blockchain technology. 

The biggest shared cloud-based services that can be leverage among black-owned businesses are accounting and supply-chain functions. Distributed ledger technology using blockchain is offered by the Manufactured Solution Toshikiso platform where multiple merchants can share a blockchain where the data is encrypted for each merchant but the ledger can be verified by all merchants using a forward-hashing interrogation technique. 

So a business does not need to launch and purchase expensive accounting software packages – the transactions can be written directly to a blockchain distributed ledger shared by other merchants who all verify the credibility of the ledger together. For supply chain where shipping and inventory, a distributed ledger can also hold these entries as well. Even loyalty points and programs can be stored by multiple merchants on a ledger. So as you see, businesses can just launch their ledgers on shared services and get up and running quickly. 

Collective Artificial Intelligence

When black-owned businesses share their business data on a ledger, machine learning can now serve as advisors to help black-owned businesses stay afloat and healthy. For too long, we seen the frustrations of black entrepreneurs not knowing who to turn to or even ashamed to admit their business is struggling financially. The Manufactured Solution have advisory machine learning providing a feature called “Insights” to help entrepreneurs along their journey. 

These machines have learned not just from the black-owned businesses but from other business operations around the world and understand the patterns of successful businesses and businesses that failed to help detect trending patterns and offer recommendations to black-owned businesses to keep afloat – in full confidential communication. 

It is important to understand that it is best for black-owned businesses to start using shared services so we can break from the taboo of suffering in silence as struggling entrepreneurs and instead create enough data points to allow machine learning help us figure out how to start thriving with black-owned businesses. Machine learning can quickly figure out what the customer wants, figure out what products are selling well or need discounting and determine how the ledger need to be adjusted. 

The Result - A Morning Baltimore House Music Dry Bar

The future of black-owned businesses born in the cloud is super exciting because of the unlocking of black creativity and experiential businesses services we never seen before in our community. We are expecting an explosion of black-owned businesses we never seen before or mixed before or tried before creating a level of excitement and engagement in the black community with the help of shared services and machine learning driven by mobile-first interaction. 

For example, imagine someone in Baltimore creating a “morning club” from 4:00am to 7:00am featuring house music and serving “dry bar” drinks such as garnished fusion water where a professional grown and sexy morning crowd can dance to house music into the sunrise to begin a beautiful day before heading off to work. How can they do this with The Manufactured Solution platform? 

They can use Kossier mobile platform to allow their customers scan a QR code to purchase an admission ticket to the event. Kossier allow them to simply check-in with their QR and look up to show they have access to the morning club using tokenization represented as a single ticket assigned to the Kossier user – that’s how payment and admissions are handled. 

The streaming music from the AV system can come from Kolin-Avers a media platform that not only stream the music but pay royalties to the house music creatives directly who music is being performed in the club. 

Shared ledgers can serve as the running tab of a Kossier user who is charged for a drink or the refresh station or lockers to change before going to work. A new black-owned business model of brothas and sistas housing it up 5am in the morning before going to work – stuff we black folks do and what we actually are can now be unlocked when we have a new paradigm to launch a business. 

Being born in the cloud gives the benefits of lower cost to launch operations and faster time to market with creative ideals. If mistakes are made, black-owned entrepreneurs can learn from artificial intelligence insight and support or simply fail fast with smaller losses than running a traditional business operation. But the biggest benefit is we are now unlocking new paradigms of black-owned businesses unleashing the creativity we were meant to showcase as entrepreneurs. 

The future of black-owned business has never been so exciting and promising.