Innovation and productivity going hand in hand is how creative companies emerge to outpace and become more established market leaders. Digital transformation continues to drive this market environment, including the willingness of individual companies to adopt agile business models and business automation. In recent years, leaders have had to get used to, and prioritize, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and automation. Business leaders leverage technology that accelerates tech-driven business growth through continuous innovation while prioritizing efficiency with enterprise resource planning. CEO Insights interacted with top industry leaders and here is how they leverage technology for business growth.
Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director—South Asia, NVIDIA
"In every country, 'Intelligence' will play a crucial role. If the Software 1.0 and Software 2.0 eras were mostly about software engineers, today, Software 3.0 is all about a democratized digital experience where you and I can interact with the computer and derive intelligence. That intelligence is the need of the hour across business verticals. It will take all economies to the next league, including the Indian economy. As most of us know, India has been the cradle of humans for generations, and in recent times, it's been defined as the world's back office. Today, India has a tremendous opportunity to be the front office of the world, thanks to AI, and accelerated computing. The country is increasingly finding ways to co-exist with computers as a single unit. We are a nation known for our software engineers who serve the entire world. With the adoption of new natural language models, we can increase the productivity of our software engineers to the tune of four to five times. This will enable the quantum of our software engineers to take us to the front office of the world.”
Venkat Raghavan, Director, Analytics, Tesco Business Solutions
“Leaders using data and analytics to build a data-driven culture truly embody modern leadership. By relying on data insights, leaders can make informed decisions, guide strategic initiatives, and create an environment where data is valued and used throughout the organization. This approach changes the organizational culture, ensuring decisions are based on solid evidence rather than just intuition. Data-driven leadership promotes transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement. Leaders set the example by advocating for data in decision-making and encouraging everyone to adopt data-driven methods in their daily work. This not only boosts efficiency but also gives colleagues a sense of ownership and confidence, knowing their decisions are backed by data.”
Vikram Pawah, President, BMWGroup India
“At BMW, we move body, heart, and mind. The world around us is changing – and at the BMW Group, we see it as our responsibility to help shape that change. We aim to make individual mobility more human, more intelligent, and more responsible – to create an inspiring future for us all. We believe three key action areas will dominate the mobility of tomorrow: electric, digital, and circular. Each of these on its own is already a challenging and inherently complex task. Combining all three aspects into a coherent overall concept is the ultimate challenge. This capability will determine future competitiveness in our industry.”
Raja Lakshmipathy, Vice President and Managing Director, Genesys India & SAARC Region
“At Genesys, our ethical deployment of AI is guided by four foundational pillars. The first is the integration of empathy, ensuring that AI interactions are considerate and understanding. The second pillar focuses on privacy. We have long adopted a 'privacy by design' approach to enhance processes without relying on personally identifiable information (PII), thus safeguarding individual rights. The third pillar aims to identify and mitigate bias, promoting fairness in AI-driven decisions. Transparency in everything we do constitutes the fourth pillar, involving clear communication with stakeholders about the decision-making processes. An ethics committee oversees these principles, educating engineers to maintain the highest standards of care and ethical use in AI applications.”
Thompson P Gnanam, Managing Director & Global CEO, 3i Infotech
“One of our initiatives that aims to democratize knowledge using AI-enabled models is a case in point. We leverage the power of Generative AI to help employees from Tier-3 and Tier-4 cities deliver more efficient, effective throughput. This helped us create a superior, extremely motivated workforce comprising people who otherwise wouldn't have had the chance to work in Tier-1 cities. While this is a great initiative to manage the capitalist needs of investors and shareholders, it also helps us give back to our societies - providing the less privileged with jobs and complementing them with capabilities using AI. This generative AI-powered model is the way forward, and all investments must be aligned with these models to disrupt existing ones.”
Neel Mehta, Director & Co-founder, Asteria Aerospace
“Ensuring trust among customers while maintaining a competitive edge is paramount. Adherence to regulations and industry standards during manufacturing and operations is a cornerstone of building trust. For mission-critical applications, quality assurance is non-negotiable. Leaders should adopt a holistic approach encompassing rigorous testing, continuous monitoring, and robust validation processes while developing products and solutions. Further, establishing a robust customer support system is key to offering timely responses and ensuring the success of your customers while they adopt rapidly evolving drone technology."
"Proactive assistance during critical moments demonstrates a genuine dedication to customer success. With the industry excited about the potential of AI/ML to streamline operations, leaders should also prioritize integrating real-time analytics and monitoring tools on drone data to provide customers with actionable insights and predictive maintenance capabilities,” adds Mehta.
Rajan Sethuraman, CEO, LatentView Analytics
“The most vital aspect of data transformation is to believe in data and act upon the idea that data & analytics can make a huge difference in the organization’s decision-making. We can call it the data analytics maturity of an organization. The organizations on the higher side of this maturity index equip themselves with high-quality data & analytics and act up the actionable information across the functional departments, organizational policies, and customer engagements, among others. Unfortunately, the organizations that reside low on this meter still resort to traditional ways and end up making crucial business decisions based on gut feeling and experience. They don’t trust the data. That’s a challenge organizations must overcome to succeed in the digital era.”
Yezdi Nagporewalla, Chief Executive Officer, KPMG India
“At KPMG, our priorities remain unchanged - An unwavering focus on quality, our commitment to providing clients with a broad spectrum of professional services, and our continued investment in innovation, modern technologies, and methods of working, through which we aim to foster confidence and empower change in business and within our communities. We remain committed to putting people first. India is a key growth area for the company globally; throughout the years, we have reinforced our global ties and worked towards becoming a global talent center for our international member firms. As a company responsible for generating employment and prosperity, we are motivated by trust and inspired by opportunity.”
Kishor Patil, Co-Founder, Managing Director, & CEO, KPIT Technologies
“We keenly focus on automotive software. That's everything we do. We are at the forefront of the ongoing transformation in the segment while working closely with the automotive brands. As an organization, and as a leadership team, we are passionate about automobiles and mobility at large. The second thing is our vision of sustainable mobility. We constantly envision a cleaner, safer, and smarter world. We believe that it is important to focus on sustainability, as it gives us a deeper purpose, and through it, we can make a difference in the industry. And in that process, we have a reasonable chance to be at the forefront—in terms of everything from scale to quality and driving the transformation globally. In this regard, over the past five years, we have been single-mindedly focusing on this area.”
Sanjay Netrabile, Chief Technology Officer, Pepperfry
“In the pre-Pepperfry world, furniture—our core category—usually required customers to choose a product they liked from a catalog and ask a carpenter to make it. More often than not, the final product after several months didn’t always meet expectations due to the carpenter’s interpretation of the design. With this in mind, we sought to innovate and extend the customer’s natural behavior by introducing an augmented reality (AR) experience, allowing customers to visualize how furniture would look inside their homes. This effectively shifted the catalog experience from 2D to 3D, ultimately removing buyer’s remorse risk. It has since become a huge success among our users in solving such potential cognitive dissonances.”
Netrabile continues, “In light of the success of AR, VR seemed like the next logical step. Through our virtual reality (VR) experience, customers can view all types of furniture in different lifestyle settings and walk through a customized experience. In addition to giving our customers a chance to see furniture in its natural environment, we also offer thousands of combinations and units, which leaves them spoilt.”