Mr. Karmesh Vaswani | Live Enterprise | GLS | Technovanza VJTI

Pleasure to be here. Thank you for those kind and generous words, and thank you, Josh, for the generous introduction. First of all, I am deeply humbled and feel deeply privileged to have this opportunity to connect back with VJTI. I'm very grateful to VJTI as an institution which gave me ... imaginatively, and it also created a passion for the field of engineering, and that's something which has really helped me as a person, as a professional, to navigate my life through the world of business and technology. And today I'm delighted to get this opportunity to connect with the students at VJTI. Many of you will be at the cusp of finishing your engineering courses and either pursuing higher academic studies or getting into the industry or maybe joining the profession of teaching. No matter where you go, I would like to share with you some nuggets of wisdom that I've gathered over the years and how those nuggets of wisdom may be ... developed at Infosys by which we are helping companies at large across the globe. I'll try and project my screen. Just please tell me once the screen is visible.

Is my screen visible? Just yes, yes.

So, friends, the topic I'll be talking about is called Live Enterprise, which is a pragmatic approach for mainstream enterprises to compete with digital natives. And when I refer to mainstream enterprises, I'm referring to companies ... industries ... to help them reinvent themselves, to help them embrace the digital revolution that is underway with the help of technology, and to help them become more competitive for the future. Let me start by looking at a few companies. Many of the students at VJTI perhaps may have heard of these companies, at least when in the 90s, when Professor Darula and I were experiencing the evolution of business technologies, these companies were regarded as leaders in their industries, and all of these companies were companies that had in many ways defined and shaped ... they lost their competitive edge and they were taken over by next generation companies who came with more innovative business models. So this is really the topic of how do you help an enterprise to be a Live Enterprise which is able to sense the evolution around it, which is able to sense the changing needs of customers, consumers, and which is able to keep a scan of how technology compasses are shifting and how to bring those new technology capabilities into your business models. So the fight for leadership, relevance, and performance is getting more and more intense, and this is happening across industries ... services, oil and gas, you name any industry. The intensity of change, the intensity of changing customer and consumer expectations, the need to compress time with technology, all of those factors are coming into play. And many companies who have been leaders, they are now facing challenges of holding their leadership position, of remaining competitive, and in many cases they are facing challenges of sustaining their existence for the coming decade or the decades ahead. Let's look at some statistics. Standard and Poor ... they were ... they had a median age of 85 years. In just two decades that median age has come down to 30 years, and going ahead in the next five to seven years it's predicted that the top 500 companies in the Standard and Poor index, Dow Jones index, their average age would be 12 years. Now why is this happening? This is happening because a number of digital natives are coming up who don't need the same level of capital intensity which many of these established companies needed to scale their business, and the pace at which unicorns are forming in India, in China ... their valuations by nearly 8.7 times. So this trend is really putting a severe pressure on established leaders across industries, and the only constant which is coming into play is the evolving nature of technology which is helping drive constructive disruption. So let's go a little deeper into this topic and look at a set of companies whose stock performances have been indexed for the last two years, and I have consciously taken the period during the pandemic. So we entered the pandemic at the start of ... these are companies who have been in existence anywhere between 60 to 120 years, and if you look above the line these are companies who have been in existence between 30 to 60 years, and you are seeing that companies who are embracing digital, who are embracing the power of data, who are bringing data analytics at core, and evolving their business models, their relative performance is much superior than companies who have been operating in their main industries and have been relatively slow in embracing AI, digital in their business models. All of them are extremely successful companies, all of them are companies which are creating responsible ... advanced analytics, the embrace of creating new business process capabilities, the embrace of AI in your core business models, how that is being used by successful companies to continue to evolve in their competitiveness. So there is a new normal in play. This new normal is redrawing the way businesses are operated, and the successful companies are those who are passionate about looking for every opportunity to reinvent their business model. Reinvention of the business model is focused on the customer journey, the consumer journey, the employee journey in these companies, and all of that has to be achieved ... evolving, there is continuous innovation happening, and companies who continue to embrace this will be more and more successful. I've also shared over here some stats on how digital spends are on the rise, how companies are looking at digital first business model, and how digital transformation is now seen as the number one priority and number one risk by the boards of many companies. So to all of you my friends at VJTI who are about to come out of your academic life and step into your careers, I would encourage you to take the foundations of learning that you have had in VJTI ... now technology evolution is not a constant, it will continue accelerating. Moore's law is active more than ever, and here are, looking ahead over the next one to three years, here are nine facets which I think will further fuel constructive disruption in the industry. For all of you at VJTI, I would recommend that as you come out of academic fields, keep your focus on being always on learning. Technology is rapidly changing. Your biggest source of competitive advantage in your personal life and career would be your ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn ... past and metaverse is more contemporary. The cloud revolution has been in play for the last 10 or 12 years, and cloud revolution will continue to become more and more intense and more and more transformational. At the same time, the aspects of trust, transparency, privacy are gaining a lot of momentum across the globe, and we'll see more and more regulations come into play, and these regulations will also be supported by technology. So you may have careers looking at working on the regulatory side to ensure that the technology evolution that is happening is more responsible, more ethical, and there might be career opportunities to go into fields of regulation ... respect for the planet, and a circular economy where natural resources do not have to be wasted, they are consumed responsibly and bought back into a circular economy so that we are helping our future generations enjoy the same benefits of this planet as we have. There's a lot of innovation coming with 5G. Edge computing will become more and more practical and meaningful. The evolutions happening in IoT will further help us shrink time in different business models at play. Industries will continue to evolve, there will be new versions of industry evolving whether you are in manufacturing, hospitality ... community who are often looking for unethical means of creating value, and it will also mean that the cyber defense industry has to see more evolution. And finally, quantum computing would be one of the biggest game changers that the next decade will see. You'll find quantum computing is repurposing vectors of time, distance, speed in many ways in different industry and business models. So with that context and with that introduction of how the world is changing around us, I would now like to introduce to you the concept of Live Enterprise. This is a framework, this is a mind map ... how do we help them to compete strongly, how do we help them to outsmart and outclass existing and emerging digital native enterprises. Live Enterprise is a framework by which we are looking at shrinking the time frame and reducing the effort intensity that is required by organizations to embrace new tech evolutions and to help reinvent their business models. So let me give you a mind map. If you look at the top most layer here, and this could apply to any product or services companies, but this is a very simplistic way of looking at a company on how they are organized, how their value chain ... infrastructure, the business processes that are supported by that, those are typically supported by technology backbone which has evolved over the years. But as these mainstream enterprises are beginning to compete with digital natives, it's important to create a pathway where we can help them become as nimble, as agile, and as efficient as the digital natives without causing too much disruption. So this four layer stack that you see: the speed layer, the sense layer, the decision and actions layer, and the human centered experience. This is essentially a Live Enterprise construct that we have been cultivating ... which can traverse the enterprise estate, which can help bring data into data constructs like knowledge graph databases, help connect disparate sources of data whether those are from your transactional systems or from your machine and equipment systems or from your extended enterprise on the buy side or sell side, bring all data points such that they can be interconnected and associations and patterns can be evolved. There may not be any objective in creating the speed layer other than just reducing the time it takes to make queries, but once such speed layers are in play, it becomes very easy to cultivate observability and telemetry on those ... becomes easier to bring these data sets and data patterns together and cultivate that telemetry. Once these are in place, then a lot of human decision making that happens, whether that's deterministic, whether that's predictive, whether that's cognitive, a lot of those AI machine learning algorithms can be cultivated on top of these, and increasingly many of these algorithms are becoming available in utility form factors from the hyperscalers. So any enterprise whether it's in consumer products or in automotive or in retail, it becomes easier for them to bring these data sets together, build the telemetry, and think of creative uses of these ... user experience that consumers have got used to as a commodity service. Why can't that be available from a bank, from a utility company, from a transportation company, from a hotel hospitality company? So this is really a four tiered architecture which is being used by Infosys to help organizations leapfrog ahead to catch up with the digital natives, to ensure that they don't face the same challenges which some of the companies that I talked about in the beginning faced an existential challenge of the future. Now, since all of you are in engineering, I'm sure ... when I was doing engineering 28, 30 years back, we didn't have the computational power to put this into practice, so we could only do it as theoretical algorithms with limited computational capabilities. But now with the evolution of cloud, a lot of these are available as utility services from the leading hyperscalers at very low price points. So you can all, in the course of your academics, expose yourself on how to use these algorithms, gain mastery over these, and once you enter the industry, you can start thinking of shaping different building blocks in every field of industry that you are servicing. I've just set here few illustrations ... effort for discovering the critical path and updating those, driving automated monitoring and generating alert mechanisms from those. These are building blocks where in any enterprise, work components take form and shape, and often those work components introduce effort, cost, and time. But by using the power of technology, these building blocks can reduce the effort, can reduce the cost, can reduce the time, and help that enterprise improve its customer service, help the enterprise rediscover, reinvent itself. Now this may all sound a bit theoretical. I would now like to take you through some examples of how we put this into ... notice. I've anonymized the client case study, but this is a company which was operating in the US market, operating in the freight and transportation industry. Now North America is a very interesting market. 85% of the transportation capacity on roads is owned by transporters who have less than 10 trucks. In many ways it's similar to India, and the economics of running transportation in US was such that many of these small transporters have to go on different marketplaces, look for ... now this company wanted to gain market share but they did not want to do it in a capital intensive mode. So they came to us with an idea, and we worked together with them in converting that idea into a vision and into an execution where we created a marketplace, a marketplace where carriers, transporters, drivers can come and seek demand, and where customers can put up their demand, and the demand is democratically visible and available so that every carrier or a driver can choose the most optimal route that works for them and can get maximum utilization of their freight capacity ... end-to-end logistics provider. The impact has been that this company after this platform went live, within a period of two years they were able to improve their top line, their profitability, that their market valuation shot up two times. In effect, what they did is in an industry like logistics which is one of the oldest industries of mankind, they brought the power of technology to reduce time, to increase transparency, to reduce resource intensity, and help customers get better value for the money that they are spending. So this is an example of Live Enterprise coming into play. This was one case study of Live Enterprise. I will now take you to another case study. This is one of the leading fashion lifestyle companies in the world. Their brands are visible across the globe, about 30 billion dollar plus annual turnover, and they operate with a few thousand stores of their own, they have a flourishing e-commerce business of their own, but they also operate with wholesalers who sell their products and merchandise. These could be companies like Flipkart in India, could be retailers like Macy's or Nordstrom in North America ... operating with so many outlets, so many channels across the globe. How can we democratize our inventory so that we improve the quality and the timeliness of service that we give to our shoppers, to our customers, to the athletes who come and shop for our brands and products across various channels? And their aspiration was to create a platform where not only their stock and sales data but also the stock and sales data of their competitors can come together, the data can be harmonized into one common metadata format, and the data can be available for everyone to run their business efficiently without ... you can get whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want from any player in their ecosystem. How they fulfill behind will not be visible to you, but you will get the best gratification of service compared to their competitors, and you will help them reduce their cost to serve you in the process, giving more value to you. So this is another example of how a Live Enterprise construct comes together in that four-tiered architecture that I talked about a little while back and helps an organization to rediscover its performance. Now this is a company which doesn't operate on Amazon ... of a successful Live Enterprise in play. I would now like to give you an example of a digital native organization which all of us are familiar with: Uber, which is operating in most parts of the world. This is a digital native company which came and disrupted the fleet industry, came and disrupted the localized taxi business models that operated in different cities, countries across the globe, and it's very interesting to see that they are not staying constant with their disruptive business model because they are also discovering that their business model now has ... Gojek has taken their business model, applied a retail ecommerce model on top, and is now one of the fastest growing retail e-commerce business supplemented by a taxi fleet business in Indonesia, which is the world's fourth largest populous country. And it's important to keep a watch on how these companies are evolving, how they are looking at various aspects in their value chain. So looking at expected time of arrival, and are continuously looking for new data sources that are coming up, new computational capabilities that are coming up, and are continuously refining their performance on providing the most accurate ETAs in the shortest time frame possible ... last mile deliveries in retail, or that's home delivery from restaurants, or it's express delivery of parcels for businesses. The art of possible is quite unlimited when you start looking at your business as a Live Enterprise and look at different forces that are coming into play and how technology can help you both combat the forces and convert those forces into a source of competitive advantage. So I will encourage you to keep looking for these patterns. These patterns will help you shape your thinking as you get into your professional careers ahead. Now, coming from Infosys, I'll also like to ... journey in reinventing and rediscovering their business models. So this is really a hyper connected network that we cultivate at Infosys. We have young engineers like you who come and join us in roles of being an industrial engineer, an enterprise architect, a cloud architect, a new business process analyst. They come and work in different industries, it could be in retail or consumer tech or oil and natural gas. They get opportunities to work for clients in different geographies, could be in India and Asia or North America or Europe, and we encourage them to experience different functions of Infosys. They could be getting into core technology delivery or getting into ... within Infosys. But in all of this, we create an ecosystem where as a young engineer, they can become the CEO of their own career. I would like to leave this mind map with you as you shape your career options from VJTI and look at what you'll do, whether you'll pursue higher studies, join the industry, become a professor, but have this kind of a mind map so that you are cultivating such a hyper connected network of possibilities for yourself and contributing back to the society in a meaningful, in a purposeful manner. I'd also like to share with you a few key resources that you could tap into ... content available for learning, and that content is something that you can pace at your own convenience. We also encourage you to take exams and quizzes along with that content to gauge your learnability. Many options available on Coursera, and likewise the hyperscalers are also making a lot of training content easily available. So explore those avenues and see how you take the foundations that you have developed in VJTI here and apply that to the practical world as you come out of your academic journey. With that, I'd like to pause here and happy to ...

So new age startup pretty much has a blue sky, because of the advancements that have happened in technology, the cost of computing having come down, the cost of storage having come down, utility computing being available at scale. If you have good ideas, if you are clear in your mind, if you can shape strategies which are going to be constructively disruptive in an industry, and if you're a good people leader, then you have all the ingredients to launch a good business. Technology alone is not enough. It's important that leadership, strategy, vision, execution are blended with technology to create a good ...

Thank you, Josh, that's a very pertinent question. At Infosys, we have out of our 290,000 colleagues globally, we have 38% of colleagues who are women colleagues. We create a number of initiatives to help women colleagues not only flourish through their career but also give them opportunities so that they can blend personal life with professional life. And a number of initiatives are in place to make it easy for women colleagues, especially around maternity breaks that they have to take or sometimes due to family compulsions they need to change cities or change countries, so we try and make it very easy for them to ... of pride and respect in Infosys, and focus pathways for them to cultivate successful careers in Infosys. We also have a number of programs underway where especially when women colleagues take a break in their career, to help them catch up for that lost time and help them work flexibly so that they can become an integral part of the Infosys growth.

Well, I would just say that ... imagination, go and play out in areas which give you satisfaction, creative satisfaction, and enjoy the opportunities that the world puts in front of you, and do anything, do everything which creates a purpose. So be clear on purpose, everything else will fall in place.