In the corporate jungle, survival means getting an edge on the competition. For an analog business, numerous factors, such as proximity, brand and price, can keep it viable. But the rules of the game are different in the digital world where a form of Darwinism, the process of natural selection favoring the survival of some species over others, depends heavily on being good, really good.

“Even if you’re not great at it, you have enough friction in an analog world that the clients will keep coming,” explained Jesus Mantas (pictured, left), managing partner of global strategy, offerings, digital platforms, innovation and ecosystem engagement at IBM Corp. “In the digital world, being really good at something is a lot more important than in the analog world. I call it either thrive or die very quickly.”

Mantas spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They were joined by Mani Dasgupta (pictured, right), chief marketing officer of IBM Global Business Services, and they discussed the keys to survival in the digital world and the importance of using data in the enterprise to gain competitive advantage. (* Disclosure below.)

Embracing reinvention

One of the keys to survival involves embracing business reinvention, the dawn of an era in which the combined impact of new technologies like artificial intelligence are reshaping enterprise architecture. It involves the evolution of a next-generation business model highly dependent on leveraging data to fully understand the core competitive advantage.

“As a company, do you know why you exist?” Dasgupta asked. “And once you get to that, how do you take it to your clients in a way that will help you grow and sustain growth in the future? That truly is the future of a smart business, what we call the cognitive enterprise.”

IBM has outlined seven keys to success for the cognitive enterprise, which include redesigning company workflows around AI and building a customer relationship based on trust and security. The company’s team that works with clients to build the cognitive enterprise sees the confluence of key technologies as an inflection point for many companies, according to Dasgupta.

“You can truly bring the power of these technologies to start making sense of the data that you own and use it to create your competitive advantage,” Dasgupta said. “That decision to be who you want to be is really at the heart of the cognitive enterprise and what we’re proposing to clients.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE