AI is reinventing business models for companies: Sanjay Srivastava, Chief Digital Officer, Genpact

Prior to Covid-19, many businesses were on a five-year roadmap to digitise their operations. Now most want to become fully digital within just two years, says Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital officer, Genpact. “In fact, there has been an accelerated consumption of cloud-based services and solutions leading to 10x faster acceleration to the cloud. This will lead to a consistent user experience, improved productivity and open more rooms for innovation,” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interview. Excerpts:

What technology do you foresee to be a lifesaver in the IT industry?
Most enterprises are already in agreement that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring unparalleled value to their organisation. We don’t think of AI as artificial intelligence, we think of it as augmented intelligence—that which augments a human’s capabilities with machine learning and AI. At the same time, AI is changing the future of work and reinventing business models for enterprises. With digital transformation moving beyond the CIO, value is being created by driving true experience-led journeys that reimagine siloed organisations as seamless end-to-end enterprises.

How has the industry accelerated growth and consumption of digital transformation services in Covid-19?
One of the things the pandemic has shown us is that digital transformation is no longer a “nice to have”, it’s a “must have”. The digital transformation choices that organisations make today will help them prepare for a future in which they will need to demonstrate a more holistic outlook, act more transparently and ethically, and deliver hyper-personalised experiences.

Digital transformation is an imperative. Prior to Covid-19, many were on a five-year roadmap to digitise their operations. Now, most want to become fully digital within just two years. In fact, we are seeing a 10x faster business acceleration to the cloud. Companies understand that they must accelerate their digital transformations or be left behind.

We’re also seeing several trends that are causing customers in the IT industry to expedite their five-year roadmap to digitise their operations. These key trends include:

Cloud journeys are accelerating: Genpact is seeing a significant acceleration to the cloud as an increasing number of executives experience the availability, resilience, and performance of cloud-based applications like Microsoft Teams.
AI and analytics are mainstream: Analytics professionals have never been in as much demand. Executives working on fast-changing economic and business strategies need more information, insights and predictions than ever before.
AI requires humans in the loop: Al and data analytics can deliver possible solutions at amazing speed but “the last mile,” the actual decision, still belongs to humans only and is how enterprises can truly act with confidence.

End-to-end digitisation enables shift from auto-mation to autonomous: Enterprise processes are increasingly moving from automated to autonomous. The difference is in automating some components of a process versus automating the entire process.

What are the essentials for a successful digital transformation?
Successful digital transformation, leveraging cloud-based solutions require three competencies that customers are investing in: First, deep domain knowledge to drive the functional design and configuration of new business architecture. Second, transformation services that help discover plan, change, manage, and programmatically drive cloud projects across all four assets in our company, people process data and technology. And third, the ability to bring together the building blocks of services on a cloud backbone in an agile way.

We are partnering with top cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure and strategic go-to-market partners such as Deloitte to bring these cloud-based solutions in all our high priority areas, such as finance and accounting, supply chain management, banking operations, and insurance operations. For example, for a large industrial client, we are re-imagining their cash collections process to reduce errors in payments and improve regulatory compliance by re-platforming their collections application to Amazon Web Services in order to drive improved cash flows.

What are the initiatives and services Genpact is offering in cloud?
At Genpact, we combine our deep industry and business process knowledge with unique cloud accelerators, best practices, and platform partners to deliver cloud solutions aligned to the needs of our clients’ businesses. We focus on where we can add value to introduce the right cloud services, for the right processes, at the right time. Deep and varied partnerships provide speed and expertise in this fast-paced, ever-changing environment, and we are constantly deepening our ecosystem of partners.