By Chuck Hollis, senior vice president of cloud infrastructure at Oracle.

Every now and then, something comes along that fundamentally changes the way the world works. The microprocessor ushered in general-purpose computing. A DARPA research project became the internet. And smartphones permanently altered how we live our personal and professional lives. From a business perspective, these technologies were transformational. You couldn’t do business the same way once they’d been adopted. Our current era is uniquely challenging as we grapple with no fewer than three transformational technologies. The race is on. And, thanks to cloud computing, enterprise adoption rates for these technologies are orders of magnitude faster than for others in the past.

The big three?

First, there’s the Internet of Things, or IoT. Every physical object can now be a sensor. A world of sensor-embedded things becomes a world of data, including us as individuals thanks to wearable tech. Next up, there’s artificial intelligence, or AI. Software analyzes, makes decisions, and takes action in ways previously associated with humans. And it gets smarter over time. Finally, blockchain. Far more than enabling digital currencies, it’s the ability to capture and preserve transactions and events in an unalterable and verifiable way. No more headline news about deleted texts or emails, for example.

Tsunami of Transformation

Taken separately, each technology is compelling in its own right. Taken together? A veritable tsunami of transformation will be unleashed. This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the power of these three (see “IoT, AI, And Blockchain: Time To Re-imagine The Art of the Possible?”). And I’m quite sure it won’t be the last. From a business leader’s perspective, there are a lot of positives to consider. Improve existing processes. Create entirely new ones. And get busy thinking about all the great new products and services that could be offered as a result. Heady times ahead.

There’s also justifiable cause for concern. Transformative technologies open the door to competitors and disruptors. They also demand organizational transformation to fully exploit their power, and that’s never simple or easy. Heavy lifting ahead.

My advice to business leaders?

Figure out what’s fundamentally changed. Look at the past. The microprocessor made computing cost-effective. The internet enabled us to connect to anything and everything. And the smartphone made it easy to take a computer and access the internet wherever we went. Well, as long as we remembered to charge it. With IoT, we’re equipping machines to be our eyes and ears. With AI, we’re teaching software to do some of our thinking. And with blockchain, we’ve created a powerful new trust mechanism that can verify important information.

Next, figure out how those developments might change the way you and your company do business. If you can’t come up with at least three big ideas, keep trying.

Consider assembling a tiger team to experiment with some of those ideas. Why? It’s pretty hard to be innovative when your day job demands your full attention. Give the members of that team the time and resources to fail, and encourage them to fail fast. The cloud, by virtue of its on-demand compute, database, software development, and other IT resources, can help here. The goal should be accelerated learning in your specific context.

When things start to look promising—and they will—shift your attention to the process and organizational change required to exploit the new way of doing things. Transformational technologies demand business transformation—that’s what makes them different. They change the way you do business. You can’t separate one from the other.

Your path in this new, emerging world may be different. As long as we all acknowledge that when the rules change, it’s an entirely new game.