 got an interesting topic to deliberate. How do you shape the culture and get your organization ready for the 21st century? It's a big loaded agenda that we've got to unravel in 30 minutes. So let's make the most of it. So my quick reflection on this topic when I look at it, we all know we are in the middle of a VUCA world. There is tremendous volatility. There is tons of choices that need to be made and the margin of errors are low in this hyper competitive world. You know, there was a time when we said US is the biggest consumer market, China is the factory of the world, India is the back office sort of inching towards the R&D center, but all of that is changing. And technology is a very big part of that change and shift that's happening. You know, it's at a point of inflection where things can be done very differently. And all of that in the world where cost of capital is going up. So it's a, it's a bloody tough job to run a large corporate in this environment where you are at a whiteboard practically reimagining and redesigning where the wealth creation for the future is going to be, value creation for the future is going to be. And, and when I look at all this environment and I look at this quote from C.K. Prahlad, you know, he said, what's the difference between a startup CEO versus a MNC manager? Right? What is the difference? It seems the MNC has a lot more resources at their disposal. But he said the startup entrepreneur lands up dreaming much bigger than the resources at hand and making things work. So the ambition is not subservient to the resources you have at hand. You're dreaming and you're moving towards it versus some of the MNC managers limit their ambition to the resources that are available at hand. And this VUCA world that I just narrated requires each one of us, requires the 21st century companies to think big, dream big and, and, and, and, and play beyond the resources and innovative business models in making that shift happen. So with this as a backdrop, you know, very well, warm welcome Abhishek and Amit. You know, Abhishek is like she mentioned a venture investor. So clearly looks out on the investment opportunities, new business models that are relevant for the pro consumer. And, you know, Amit is, you know, runs the sales and strategy for a, for a large IT services company. And again, is in the middle of technology and innovation and helping companies evolve. So let's, let's build a conversation from there. So Abhishek, I'm going to pick you up first, given your role. You know, and I want to pick up the first bit on culture. You know, there are some large companies who will invest in, you know, a smart leader who is responsible for driving innovation in the company, responsible for driving next generation investments in the company. But you know, the question to be deliberated is, is innovation the charge of one large leader? Or is this a need that you need to create that culture across the organization at the width and the length of the organization? It's a big rock to move, but what is the right choice to make? So I would imagine it's a bit of both. I would say that in our case specifically, Vipro is such a large name and it's a legacy company, right? It's a very, very old company. They've been doing things in a certain manner for a very long time. So you might need that specialist innovation officer in place just so that he can bring in those ideas to the company. Sure, the leadership is aware that, you know, they need to change according to times. You need to change according to consumer preferences. But having that one guy who is specifically focused, who's dialed in and whose main job is to bring about that change, that is something that can actually benefit the company, because he's the one who can bring in those initial ideas for the management to act upon. I mean, just a quick raise of hand in the room. I mean, how many of you represent companies who've got, you know, a innovation leader, a digital leader who's kind of charged with saying, okay, let's recreate the business model of the future? Just to show off hands. Interesting. So you've got to build a case of having a role like that. No, it's important. I mean, so one of the recent studies by PWC, and this is, you know, a CEO survey that we do every year. This was launched in Davos, you know, earlier this year. And it says 60% of global CEOs, 60% of global CEOs came back and said their current business model and business relevance will vanish in the next 10 years. It's a very telling reflection. 60% of global CEOs are saying their business model will not be relevant in 10 years time. And the ground reality is I am less worried about those 60%. As a practitioner, I'm worried about the 40% who are sitting complacent. I mean, trust me, the 60% will still land up innovating. The other 40 might just go down the drain. And this I'm talking about global CEOs that includes India as well. So, you know, in this world where we have to innovate, right, that's, you know, there is no choice out there. I want to pick up, you know, your perspective on saying how do we create an environment, you know, like he said, you know, you can have one innovation officer, but you have a room full of people who don't seem to have an innovation officer. How do you create a Google culture where possibly a 29-year-old may be able to step in and create a Google Maps business, you know, unlock and create a significant value? I mean, any quick reflection, how do you create that environment in the organization? So, I think you said it right that innovation is not an option. It is must. And I think most of the organizations out there have already understood that they cannot live without innovation. Now, the speed of innovation can vary from organization to organization depending upon the culture that they have kind of built in. Now, when we talk about culture, it starts from top to bottom. You know, like we heard the speakers in the morning, everyone was talking about how they are kind of creating that culture of innovation where every idea is welcome. It is not that at the end of the day I'm the one, I'm the innovation officer, and I'm responsible for bringing in all the innovations within the organization. How do I create a culture where every, not 29-year-old, rather 19-year-old, can come in and say that this is what is happening and this is what we should do? Now, how do you value that input and how do you build on that input is something that the culture that you built? I think every organization today have innovation as part of the value. Now, how much you live that value is dependent upon all the people. I think it is not one, but the entire leadership team, the second layer, and then the bottom layer. So I'm going to bring just to add to Amit's point. So what I've noticed is that if the leadership is receptive to new ideas, if the leadership has an open door policy that they adopt in the company, it's not something that you can write down in text. It's not a policy that you build. It's just a culture that already exists. So the employees are comfortable going up to them, giving their ideas. I mean, you might be wrong like 95% of the times, but to get to that 5% of correct, great, fantastic, brilliant ideas, you have to shift through that 100%, right? So just creating that atmosphere for everybody to come up to them, speak to them, speak to them very openly, that is something that can really, really improve your culture. So I'm going to my next questions to the venture capital here, who makes the spreadsheet talk, who delivers a certain return on every investment. You know, how do you deal with this? I mean, it's all very fancy and nice to say, you know, open door, come in through ideas, the 25 year old and 19 year old will create a business. I mean, you're, you're, you're running a treadmill, you've got quarterly report outs to do, you've got to deliver returns. How do you balance between investing in core business versus toying with all these glamorous ideas out there that may be future? But you know, how do you, how do you strike a balance? More than striking a balance between the two, you need to kind of realize that it's a synergistic process. So you're not going to be spent, you cannot allocate 20% of your time just to innovation and 80% of your time to core business, right? You need to somewhere realize that actually innovating helps your core business. So just to give you a very, very small example, back in 2020 December, Vipro entered into the food space for the first time. Now we are primarily a personal care product company, but we entered into the food market for the very first time. By Jan, they had acquired two brands. So they're pretty serious about this, right? They want to enter into food. They know that they're going to do big things there. In the next six months, not announced, but they had already developed a full fledged R&D lab complete with a sensory chamber. And you had all these big weird gizmos in their gigantic machines just focusing purely on quality of the food that you're going to produce. So in six months time of announcing that you're going to enter into a business to developing a full fledged lab, just goes to show that your innovation and your core business has to somewhere go hand in hand. That's a great telling point he's making. Innovation can't be at the periphery. You know, if you really mean innovation, it has to be at the core of the business. And that's where, you know, some of the right decision making and thinking can happen. No, fantastic. So I'm going to move on to the next block. So I think the case is established. You know, we need to be innovative. The business models need to shift. We need to move fast to be able to make that happen. And when I think of all of these, it seems like the whole startup ecosystem out there is a big opportunity for large corporates to leverage, right? There is enough that's happening in that lab, startup lab, if I can put crudely, for the large corporates to embrace and learn from. So, but that opens up a whole bunch of can of worms, right? What models? How do you shortlist the right startups? You know, how do you make it work? What are some of the showstoppers in that entire piece? And again, I thought, Abhishek, given your sort of venture role and the investing you're doing for Vipro, I mean, how do you see this entire startup space and how do you go around prioritizing making investments and making it work for your board and the stakeholders? So primary goal is, so just to give you a little bit of context, Vipro is predominantly an offline company, right? The kind of customers that we are targeting are primarily reached via the offline channel. We have a very, very strong distribution network. We have excellent retail touch points where we still haven't really developed our business is in the online space. Simply because the kind of customers that we're targeting are not there online. But we know for the fact that maybe five years, 10 years down the line, the online space is going to grow big. Our customers are going to be there online. So we have to ensure that we're reaching out at them some point in the future. So the way that we've gone about doing this is by setting up a venture fund. Now this venture fund invests in new age D2C companies. The goal here is obviously to make a financial return. That's primary goal number one. But goal number two is to somewhere learn the kind of new business models that these guys are doing, how their marketing and branding strategy is placed. Basically just absorb whatever these guys are doing so that somewhere later down the road we could implement the same in our own business. So that's one of the top two goals that we have with setting up the VC fund itself. Very interesting. So I mean, there's over hundreds of billion dollars that get invested in sort of venture funding through the corporate route, right? And that's just a fantastic way of, you know, playing with innovation, trying innovation at an arms length and getting that rub off to your core business. And at some stage hopefully bringing them in if required. But again, I don't see this at scale happening across a big part of corporate India. I mean, so just again, you know, show of hands. I mean, for those of you who represent large companies here, I mean, do you have like a venture in investing happening as a part of that core business? Any show of hands? Isn't this a big missed opportunity for large corporates? I mean, there's wealth creation, there's innovation, there's rub off. And it's, you know, you're capping that risk exposure to a certain percentage. Do you want to share one story of a recent investment you would have done that's public and how you're learning from it? So actually a few of them, I think the biggest takeaway that we have in one of our investments, this company called Mike Lam, it's a billion dollar enterprise now, valued using Unicorn basically. And you invested when they were Unicorn? We invested before they became a Unicorn. We made a pretty sizable return on that. But apart from just the return element, again, like I mentioned, their marketing and branding strategy are so, so strong that we just had to get the founders on board, interact with our own marketing team, and sort of learn what are the things that they did right, what are the things that they did wrong, what are the learnings that they had. So it's a very collaborative sort of setting that we've managed to create with the whole investments that we're doing. So our marketing team is able to play off that and kind of build and strategize around how they want to grow in the future. Because again, like it's going to be a 10-year plan that we have to go online. So that's one of the actually that's actually one of the very few recent memories that's what comes to mind. So I want to double-click and underline this point very, very important for the room. You know, the research says it's startups, there's a 20% greater chance of innovation being delivered if large corporates were to embrace them. So that's money on the table for large corporates. And like the show of hands we just saw, we don't have venture teams who are making those investments. So I want to bring you into the question, for companies that don't have the luxury of, you know, a hundred million dollar corpus to go out and make investments, should they just shat their eyes to the whole startup opportunity? Are there other engagement models with which the two sides can work together? See, there could be other models, but as I stated, the reality is very individual. From the viewpoint that you look at it, if I look at the startup ecosystem from my lenses, I see collaboration in two aspects. One is being an IT service company, a lot of startups come to us to build some solutions, right? Because startups are someone who is disrupting the market and, you know, more or less with the technologies that they are, the platforms that they're building. So one collaboration that we have is for the startups for whom we are building the solutions, right? And second collaboration is because we are into IT services, we are building custom solutions for our customers. So in a lot of cases it is not necessarily that we have to build everything from scratch. There are a lot of components which are available which can be brought together to build a bigger solution. That is also where we collaborate with a lot of startups who have done some significant work in a specific area. So when we go to our customer, we take those options along that rather than reinventing the wheel, these are the solutions which are already available in the market which can be, you know, part of the overall solution that you are building. So that is how we look at, you know, the startup ecosystem. So if you can't invest at a minimum collaborate, because when you collaborate you co-create a market, you know, there's about 60 percent CMOs who've gone back and said that the customers expect a new product and a new offering. And very often we kind of, I mean I was sitting with a media company the other day, I won't take the name and they're a news company and, you know, I'm sure, you know, this is a media event and they said, we asked them a question saying, who's your competition? They said, there are nine other news companies out there and you've got to stand out. How do you want to stand out? The most honest news is ours. All ten are talking the same thing. You have to create a new product, you have to create a new offering, you have to innovate, you have to, you know, distinguish yourselves. But the ground reality is for the last decade they've been a news company. How will they change? And that's the matchmaking we landed up doing a speed up you see where we brought in a few JNAI startups and said, you know, you've got crazy amount of content and they can convert that content into reels, you know, through technology, you know, without the editorial efforts to go in and that could engage a whole bunch of people that you don't currently engage in. I mean, I'll give you another example, you know, we were sitting with an OTT player the other day, you know, which is actually, you know, focused on a particular language and they are pretty much the leaders in that space and they said, kuch Nia kya kar sakta hai? You know, the whole business model is around adding more subscribers onto the platform, right? And they're all, all OTT players are competing in that same space with the content. And in that brainstorm, what came out is that, you know, what will it take for my OTT content to get converted into reels, to be disseminated through a WhatsApp medium, to be consumed in a paper use bytes. So you and I are watching a movie, we have this aha moment and we want to capture that aha moment in a one minute reel and share it back with my ecosystem. You know, that's a whole new way of experiencing that OTT platform. Now this OTT company doesn't have the technology where with all our thinking to be able to do that. But there are three other startups together with that OTT company that can make this business model come to life and that's where the space of innovation is going to be. That's where an agile 21st century organization is going to be. Now you could go back and be arrogant and say that's not my business but trust me, somebody will disrupt that business with the cheese moving on. Amit, I want to bring you into this discussion. You know, it is said 30 percent of the global GDP is going to be digitized in the next five years. Five years, 30 percent of all economic activity will be digital, right? It's going to be a digital economy. So two things out there, there is a 70 percent out there that is still waiting to be disrupted. I mean that's an optimist thinking, you know, and that's value creation for consultants like us. You know, we'll hopefully work with them and get them into that side. But 30 percent is a large enough ecosystem that will disrupt the core, the traditional business models. That means the time to act is now. You might be just completely out of game if you're not, you know, like the Wipro example, you may be a large company but they realize they need to get digital, they need to get online and hence they're moving fast to be able to make that happen. So the need for business model shifts is very, very well established and for those business model shifts as a technologist I'd go back and say technology plays a very pivotal role, beyond culture that we spoke of, plays a very pivotal role in terms of enabling that shift. So if I were to ask you amidst the limited resources every company has at disposal, is there a particular technology that you'd like to go long on in terms of trying to play around with digital models? How do you, how do you help take your company or your customers to the emerging business models in today's world? See, there are two ways to look at this, right? There are certain organizations, as we stated, which has an innovation mindset or a growth mindset. When you have a growth mindset, you think about the ways to evolve, right? Then you're not thinking about the technology. Technology has always been an enabler and it will continue to be an enabler and also the disruptor, right? But when you think about innovating, you think about different technologies, not specifically that I want to build something on Java or I want to build something on, you know, generative AI or I want to build something on this and that. It is about having that mindset of growth and leveraging technology because technology has been evolving very fast. So how can you leverage technology to enable your growth or to accelerate your growth? Second way is where there is a lack of cultural innovation, right? There is a lack of culture of innovation. There, the fad is that there is a buzzword out there in the market. I want to leverage generative AI. I don't know exactly how to leverage that. I think that is where our, as you stated, we as a consultant, that is where our role come into picture, to understand the business and then find out the use cases where these technologies can be leveraged. So obviously, technology will continue to be an enabler and accelerator. It is on the disposal of those innovation officers or the people who are within the organization or the people like us who have to go and educate them. So it is, you know, we had spoken a lot about the conversational type of selling where we try to make customer understand what is the value that they are getting. We are moving a one step ahead where we are talking about experiential selling where you actually see how this is actually performing rather than just on the theory how you can actually see the journey of the user how it is actually impacting the business model. So obviously, you know, technology is going to be an important role. So since you picked upon generative AI, I mean, I want to get the room a little, I mean, I completely agree with him. End of the day, you're solving a problem and a way to solve a problem could mean technology as an enabler. So rather than betting on one particular technology, let's solve for a problem, I get it. But I want to sort of double click on generative AI, right? 60 days, 100 million people were using generative AI, right? So it's clearly something that's democratized, that's changed the way you consume a particular service or interact with a particular, you know, platform. In the first six months of this year, $12 billion have gone in Genai related investments, right? So somebody out there is moving the cheese. And again, before I get to the panel, I want to ask a question. You know, for those of you here, you know, how many of you are either personally driving a change leveraging Genai or are aware that the company is doing something on Genai that will have a difference in the way you reach out to customer or you manage your people or you manage your supply chain or you drive manufacturing or you collaborate in the market. You're just a show of hand. You know, how many of you think it's real and your company is doing something tangible or you're doing something tangible in that space? A show of hands. So it's less than 5%. Right. And I'm saying there's $12 billion already onto that space. There are research reports that are saying that $5 trillion worth of new economic value ad will come out of AI. Where Genai is a subset of that. Right. There are research reports that go back and say it has the capacity of taking about 40 to 50% of the cost out in the way you run the business. So it's here and now and I still somehow think, you know, we are as corporate India a little lethargic in terms of the spirit which we are leveraging. The startups are doing phenomenal. But if you're not leveraging them for a core business, that becomes a problem. So I'm going to bring you Amit back to the conversation on Genai to saying if is it hype, is it for real? Number one, number two, wherever you think it's in the spectrum, which part of the value chain is like a no brainer that, you know, companies have no choice but to get started with? So to answer your first question, this is real. You know, it is real guys, loud and clear, it is real. So please go talk to your CTOs, CFOs, CEOs and make that happen. And if they don't get it, please spend some time on startups with the Genai add on to your solution to say how can we can collaborate? Please. Like we have been talking about AI for a long, long time, right? And now this is the evolution of AI where Genai has come into picture and like you stated in the last six months, the kind of subscriber base that they have kind of built up, which also leads me to another discussion that we had that by in the next five years, 30% of the GDP will be digitized. So we don't know. It could be 70%. Because the way the evolution is happening, you can't predict the future. Five years is a long, long time. You know, maybe in next six months, one year, what is going to happen? We don't know. Your second question is about where to leverage Genai. So with technologies, with the technologies like Genai or you talk about RPAs or you talk about blockchain, these are the technologies or IoT. These are the technologies which are the enablers. Now it is left to the individual. Now how can you think about the use cases where you can use Genai? One of the one of the areas could be, you know, customer engagement where now people are looking for more and more personalized experience where you want to have more and more artificial intelligence being built into the products so that you can predict what your customer need. Second most impacted aspect that I feel is the supply chain because everything is getting fueled through a supply chain. How Genai can be used either for forecasting predictive analytics, you know, all that stuff. So there are a lot of use cases even I can't think about the use cases. We are the technologist and then the customers whom we work with, they come up with their problem statement and then we think that how technology can be leveraged to build those solutions. We have been building some solutions for in the NBFC space, in the fintech space, in the fnb space by using Genai. But these are those people who are bringing in their problems and then we have a technology at our disposal which was not there maybe six months back so we were not able to think about it. But now we had that technology so we can think about how that Genai can be used to give a better experience to a customer. I want to bring the whole given just five percent people raised hands on the reality check of Genai in their business. I mean I just want to give you a live example. So if a hundred million people experience chat GPT as a way of consuming information and those hundred million people today find you know Google search a little tell me just in one line what the message is why do you want me to read 10 articles to get to that point. Don't you think there needs in terms of how they consume and engage with brands is going to change? I mean I was on a and I'm happy to take names I mean I was on Taj website trying to figure out a vacation for a 15th August and it's you know destination choose for your availability choose for your budget choose for your kid friendly and I choose for why can't I just go back and say I've got three days of this is my budget. I need mountains somewhere in North drivable distance from Delhi tell me what is available. Is this asking for too much. Now is this lack of resources or is this lack of changing to the times that is here and now but it's not there. And then when I go around looking at Marriott's and Hilton's and you know large global companies none of the platforms give you that today. So there is a startup who's going to come up and say I'm an integration layer on top of all of them that will interact with you and get you your solution. But why do you want to lose your customer. So it's very very real. The other day I was with a startup needle.ai and they actually came back and said you know this phone is like a computer on steroids that has every possible information. It has my banking details it has my health details it has fitness it has everything mails messages chat customer everything hundreds of apps thousands of apps and I'm struggling to cope up as a consumer. So what they've come up with is an innovation it's a genii solution they've created a layer that will be your layer to interact with all the thousand apps that I have on the phone. So if I choose to give them the access to say please talk to WhatsApp please talk to my mail please talk to this this da da da da then they will intelligently come back and be my assistant to tell me saying you know what Manpreet finish this event you've got to run for the next meeting 10 minutes early. Boom. You know and now then I said security privacy where will my data be they said we'll host it on your cloud environment. So I mean these are massive values to be unlocked. Now do you want that startup to do that or do you want you know one of these large companies to be able to bring them to the table and be able to make this opportunity real and scalable. I don't know any quick reaction you see a lot of companies come in and pitch solutions to you right are you seeing you know genii led products or solutions being pitched to you as a part of the consumer retail scam that you're doing. So I've noticed that over a period of time you have these phases of you know what the startups are trying to pitch to you. So off late yes genii has been a buzzword that's been used in the pitch decks a lot prior to that was blockchain prior to that was AI ML. So every time there's a peak where like you mentioned there's a peak where there's a hype created and then the peak dies down. So every time there is a peak we've noticed that the startups try and ride the wave. We've noticed in a couple of cases that yes genii has been used very specifically but considering that I primarily work with product companies most of these companies believe that it's better to adopt a wait and watch approach. So they would like to wait see how much of what's there what's out there is hype and how much of value is actually there. So once the hype wears off and you finally get to see the value that genii has maybe they would probably look into it. Cool. I've got a time check already so we're going to just just to add on to what he stated like when we talk about genii even all the product companies out there are using ai in some bit of form. Right. So genii is not a product. It is something which is fueling your product. Right. So all the products which are under making have some sort of ai and now they want to leverage genii. You know as part of the service company we almost every third or fourth inquiry that we receive is about how can we leverage genii in the product that we have built. So maybe as a startup they may not be thinking to go genii space but once they have reached there now they want to leverage who are already established or has crossed the MVP limit they want to leverage genii to better you know position their product out there in the market. Very quickly just the last one here and then you know we'll try and wrap that up. So you know closing the thought on genii and technology and I mean this IDC says there's about 2.3 trillion dollars that is chasing technology investments in the market. So you know it's not business as usual you don't have a choice anymore to say you know what I am a product company I am a service company I am not a technology company I am not a software company. I mean Satya Nadella says there is no company that's not a software company today. I mean a domino CEO does not call themselves as a food company they call themselves as a tech company. Right so let's be off the myth that we are not a tech company. Everybody is a tech company and if you are not one somebody will eat you. The last thing that I just want to talk just so we are not colored on tech I mean we are talking about the 21st century organization and ESG environment climate lands up being a critical topic and I want to get a sense and maybe I'll pick you in your I mean are you seeing companies new age companies startups that are sort of building solutions are they are they are they bringing ESG at the core of what their product is or is that again you know like the hype cycle right now. It is a big selling point for them they do bring that element into the picture whenever they can so I notice a lot of pitch decks whenever they are quoting about the product pros and cons their ESG element is always there and there however I would say not as advanced as countries that are there in Europe, Australia and even the United States the focus in India for that as of now is very very limited. Okay thank you I you know I'll just take maybe a minute to wrap this up and I think my one take out of this conversation is Jago India Jago you know we may be in the middle of you know a great story that the economy is going through there is a lot of geopolitics out there that's favoring us right now as a country but this is not a very interesting position to be in you know if we are you know whether it is whether it is having a culture of innovation whether it is going out and making investments in startups collaborating with startups whether it is playing with technology and sort of shaping our business models whether it is ESG investing and ESG focus in the core of products these are absolute critical blocks of a of a of a 21st century organization and in the world where CEOs are saying business models are not going to be relevant the models are going to get disrupted with these blocks so it's time to act and time to act is now you've got to realize you may not have all the talent within the company you may not be the best talent within the company so embrace the world outside and collaborate and change the way business gets done thank you so much Amit Abhishek thank you and thank you for your patience