 Hello and welcome everyone to the digital transformation session of entrepreneur India's tech and innovation summit 2020. I'm sort of Kumar editor special projects entrepreneur India, India, monitor for the session. Well, digital transformation is the buzzword today and specially after the COVID-19 outbreak, where in businesses have found their systems arcade. The need of the hour is various facets of digital in business. In this session, we will first have a short action to digital transformation by just speak Bindra digital transformation expert and author, and this will be followed by a panel discussion. So to start with, I request Mr. Bindra to come on stage and give his presentation. Thank you. So what I'm going to do now for the next 10 minutes or so is really talk about how COVID has changed everything, including work. And I'm actually going to draw upon these couple of books that you see in front of you on the screen. Both of them happen to be written by me. The tech whisperer was on digital transformation and the Indian organization, which has just come out on Kindle last week or last to last week is actually about how the work and many other things are being fast forwarded by COVID and how we can work to make our organization in new. So, you know, the curious thing about this pandemic is that it has slowed down the world, but at the same time, it has fast forwarded change. And that's a curious paradox. As this pandemic rages on and it kind of unfolds about us and all its destruction. One of the things which I think is topmost on everyone's mind is to how to find a vaccine for COVID. And you know what vaccines do. Vaccines actually do not cure a disease. Vaccines would go and, you know, in a vaccination, the weakened or dead germs or bacteria or viruses are actually injected in a in a body or in a human being. And because the immune system sees them for the first time, it starts building new kind of antibodies. And because those viruses are are are weakened or dead, these antibodies managed to overcome these big viruses and, you know, cure us. But the important thing is that next time when a similar disease hits us again, the antibodies are ready and they can withstand the disease. And that is what is called actually immunity. And that is what makes our bodies immune. So the idea that came to my mind was that, look, why something like something as big as COVID has happened? And even as we are racing to find a vaccine for it, why don't we think of COVID itself as a vaccine and learn from it and see what antibodies we can start building for ourselves in our organizations? So that next time when a disruption like this hits us, our organization is much more ready to withstand it, is much more resilient to withstand it and therefore becomes immune. And that's the book, The Immune Organization, where we are talking about future proofing organizations from future COVID-like disruptions. And, you know, as I go forward, we don't have the time for that, you know, I kind of talk about seven different antibodies that we need to create in organizations to make them more resilient, even sometimes anti-fragile against the next level, next such kind of disruption which will happen. Now, for example, we all know that, you know, global warming related disruption is going to happen to us in the next 10, 12, 15 years. And so what is it that we can learn from COVID to do now and produce some of these antibodies, you know, in terms of new business models, in terms of newer customer journeys, in terms of automation, partnerships, etc., which can help us withstand that. But a large part of that is actually about work. And if you kind of look at these antibodies and I have detailed them a little bit here, if you look at number one, which is decentralization of work, or number six, which is about lifelong learning, rescaling multiple jobs, or even about seven, which is the transformation of mindset and culture, it's really about work. And so what I'm going to do for the next two, three minutes or four minutes is just focus on the work part of it and kind of because we are talking in a future of work session and see that how we can build certain things today so that our organizations are far more immune next time. As I said, COVID has slowed down the world, but it has accelerated change. And one of the things COVID has done is that it has fast forwarded the future of work. Work was changing anyway, both from a people and from a technology standpoint. But what COVID has come and done is it's completely fast forwarded that future and that future in many ways has become the present. What you see here are the nine principles of the future of work that I talk about. And if you kind of take a glance through these and see how COVID has made them happen. So obviously, decentralized or distributed work, I mean, everyone is working from home. And the way and suddenly overnight we have kind of come to this situation where not only people working at home during the pandemic, but organizations are talking about how even going into the future after the pandemic is over, you know, work from home in some way or the other will continue. And so working from office pre-pandemic is actually going to change into working from anywhere. And anywhere would mean home, would mean offices, would mean, you know, parks, could mean co-working spaces, could mean malls. And so work is getting decentralized. And a lot of that is actually happening using collaboration technology. You know, people who were completely unfamiliar with Zoom, MS Teams, WebEx, etc. are now absolutely familiar with that. And you know that all of them usage as well as their stock prices have gone up substantially and we kind of use them to do work the way we never used to do that before. Work has also become always on. It was supposed to become always on. Now, it has become not only are we working from home, we're also working for home. And we can't back up and go home and we need to find that balance. The other important things which are going to happen because of this pandemic and work is going to change is that look very frankly, I don't think there's ever going to be a job for life. And both companies as well as employees would need to understand that and therefore employees would need to invest in lifelong learning rather than just their engineering or an MBA. They need to learn new stuff all the time until they die. Permanent and temporary stuff will become the same. Everything that can be automated will be automated. And so a bunch of such principles which we were looking as future of work principles have actually become the present. Accelerated by COVID and enabled by technology. And so I just wanted to touch at a very high level upon these things and just to kind of summarize. We can learn from COVID and its disruption today to build the right practices, the right antibodies so as to make our organizations immune for tomorrow. And secondly, amongst the many things that COVID has done, it has changed work and brought the future of work to the present. And some of these few practices we will need to continue even after the pandemic is over so that we are much more ready and make our organizations immune for the next big disruption. So this is what I wanted to share with you. This is very quickly my coordinates in case people want to get in touch with me and would be very happy to continue this chat offline. So thank you very much Saurabh and Deep and I will stop sharing and hand it over. Thank you Jaspeet. That was really interesting. So what I believe is that we all need to adapt and not just our education but more than that we need to learn life skills and acquire newer skills to navigate through all this that we are doing today. Everything online and facing glitches but hopeful that we all will be there sometime. So thank you. Thank you Jaspeet so much and for the audience we will now move to our panel discussion. And so for the panel discussion we have today Mr. Akhil Gupta, co-founder and chief tech and product officer, Nobuka and Mr. Aadish Dixit co-founder, Inflection Point Ventures. Hi Akhil. Hi Aadish. Sorry just a quick one Saurabh. Do you want me to be here or should I go off stage? Your wish. Okay fine. I'll just go off stage. Okay. If you can see you please. I'm very lucky to start with you. So you know this is a tech and innovation summit. So what we plan here is of course we would really want to understand the tech that you know companies are using to make life easier for their consumers. So very briefly if you can take us through what Nobuka is you know doing and then we can take the discussion over. Sure. Thanks for having me. So guys as you know that Nobuka is a C2C platform and the way we have changed the transaction happens in real state where until Nobuka existed you had to go to a broker. So most of it on technology and there was very few things which used to happen. All the platforms are primarily the classified platforms and they were helping you discover a broker. With Nobuka what we do is we help you connect directly with the owner tenant, buyer, seller or now in the latest last 18-24 months we have introduced services like rental agreement packers and movers. You can do cleaning, you can pay rent and all of it. And the beauty of the platform is that it's a pure play deck thing where there is no freedom on street. And when there is no freedom on street the technology has to be such that it solves all the problem what a customer might have using tech. So for instance earlier when you had to search for a house you'll go to a broker and say this is my office location, this is where my wife is working, my kids school and then that particular broker may or may not triangulate the best location for you to stay. But in Nobuka the way the technology helps is that we make sure that we triangulate the best location for you not only keeping your office, your wife's office or the kids school into the place even also consider the traffic. And how does your time to travel matters depending on your shift when you're working. So if you're working in afternoon it may not be time so you may afford to live a little further from your office and all those things. So that's the one part of it. On the other side where there was an intermediary who was helping you connect with the people now everything happens with the tech. So now once the COVID started and there was so much of lockdown where people were not able to move. One thing what we did at Nobuka was who introduced the video tool so video meetings. So now let me and Saurabh are sitting here Saurabh has the house to show what he can just do is he can just switch it on on the Nobuka app. He can take me through the app, take me through the house if I like it. I can just close the deal on the video call itself and once the lockdown uses down you can use Nobuka packer and mover to move with the complete sanitization and social distancing norms in place. Similarly because Nobuka has become the transaction platform where the maximum number of transactions happen with the kind of proprietary data we have what we have done using ML is build the data tools like rentometer where you get to know the best the ideal rent what you should be paying for a property and our data tools are so accurate that even when there are two houses next to each other or two apartments next to each other one of them is a super luxury apartment and next one is let's say luxury or semi luxury apartment. We can predict rent to the accuracy where we'll say okay building a will fetch higher rent per square feet because of so and so reasons. So that's another thing then as we started growing and when we do so as we speak we do more than one and a half like new listings we have close to 10 million one crore customers who have used our platform. We get thousands of listing on daily basis and on thousands of listing there can be pictures starting from 5, 10 pictures to go up to 20, 30 pictures. So to find the pictures on the property when owners are posting what are the relevant pictures there were two ways like either this is a team which is sitting and finding this is the picture relevant to this particular property and if somebody has put the selfie or maybe an objectionable matter or video they will remove it but at no broker what we do is we make use of AI so we have built the platform with which we detect the objects within the picture and we identify whether this picture is really relevant to the property or not and the key guiding objects for a picture will be like whether the picture has a dining table it has kitchen it has gas it has a washing machine there's a sofa there is all those things. So that we have automated the complete process with that what happens is the time for a property to go live on the portal also reduces significantly and the consumer who is looking into the pictures they don't get to see anything which is not worth their time or which can be objectionable to them. So these are few things along with that the last thing on the technology part which I want to add is no broker also has an app called no broker hood which is our apartment management app where we help you we help apartments manage their visitors security their ERP where the financials and all those things on that thing with covid so we had a solution where when the maids and the staffs and all those guys are coming within the society they had to punch in the biometric with which their attendance was taken. And now with covid what has happened is suddenly people are very scared and they have to be where when they are touching on a biometric machine they may be they may catch the infection so we have transformed the technology there with the guard device the device the guard has to enable the entries that uses the facial recognition so we have built a in-house solution with which you can register face of a maid or the staff and the next time when they are coming you can still follow the social distancing norms you can be six feet away from that particular person point the camera towards the person and the attendance will be taken automatically. So a lot of stuff goes in the primarily the reason being we don't have any feet on street we have to keep innovating and come up with the solutions which enable the transactions for the customers. I'm sure so that that's the need of the R that we need you know we need to put as much digital solutions in our businesses because as you said feet on the street is not something which we are able to do right now. Adesh if you can put your video on and take some questions. Absolutely absolutely I have I mean I've been testing this I seem to have some challenge with my bandwidth so if I put my video on my audio goes off so I tried and realized I can't go with both so you have to apologize for me for that but I can go with audio yeah go ahead please. So Adesh I will come to you with a different question you know businesses were trying to you know make a digital transformation at least everyone hopes to do so but this situation has actually worked as a catalyst for businesses to do so all the more like I can also just said that you know they have you know we did right now to you know their no broker or maybe app that they have to you know to which which which does the facial recognition also but you know not all businesses can do that a small maybe a small business may not be able to do it and if they want to get a customized solution might not be affordable so how do they do it and what do they do. So you know I think you know let me start with this analogy perhaps it's very simple analogy so let's say you have you know I'm using this euphemistically let's say you have a Ferrari on the racetrack and then you have a bullock cart on the racetrack and let's assume both are competing who do you think is going to win the race. Yeah absolutely right so that's I think the analogy we have to draw to say that look you know the digital transformation is no more a comparative differentiator what perhaps it used to be during the digital native days of Google's and Microsoft it's now you know most of the you know the digital tools so to speak whether it's hardware or software it's all democratized most of those big companies which obviously had kept it in their you know secret wallet they have unleashed and they have started to monetize which means you know pretty much whatever you need for a transformation whether in terms of hardware of course most of the hardware is now on cloud it's easy it's easily accessible to a small to medium enterprise to a large enterprise so hardware constraint is taken off by having cloud as a platform. And in terms of software constraints whether you know whether it's an application software or it's an intelligent software or any AI do you know most of the constraints that were there in terms of high Kpex in terms of like a small in a small to medium industry would have not probably paid a hundred thousand dollar license fee upfront so obviously you have the SAS model which means you know you can pay as you use or pay as you go as the case maybe so that model transformation also has happened so the two constraints the Kpex constraint is addressed by SAS model the cloud constraint or the hardware infrastructure constraint is also addressed by cloud which again is similar to the pass or SAS model which means the two fundamental constraints are now removed which basically means that small and medium enterprises now will obviously opt for you know digital way of doing the business even within the range of small and medium obviously not all businesses are open for digital transformation and I think it's too naive to say that every single business has to go through digital transformation that's quite naturally you know impossible there are businesses that are probably better run in a traditional way than probably not one so let's say somewhere in the spectrum you have set of businesses that obviously are right for digital transformation small and medium so now question is how do they go about doing it first in the foremost you know the competition will force them to do it it's not that some consultant has to show up at the doorstep and say you have to do it the speed at which the business will change what we call it as a business velocity that's going to change substantially around them because you know more and more especially the first time entrepreneurs people who are digital needed they are going to take on to the digitization right from the day when they establish this the business model which means the traditional ones who probably are not digital in nature they will be you know left behind by you know the first time entrepreneurs or the tech entrepreneurs which means that you know it's the market force that's going to drive them you know you don't really need you know anything else take for example when the ERP came in right what drove the transformation you know in terms of enterprise application it's the market of course these companies also sell and do all that but everybody realizes that if they are not on ERP I don't think so any even small to medium enterprises I can't imagine if they are going to work on you know a traditional way of you know pen and pencil ledger that's not going to happen most of them have moved on to you know irrespective of whether it's a large enterprise software like SAP Oracle or a small enterprise software like a tally etc they all moved on so to your point it's the market forces that's going to drive but what's conducive now which was not earlier was the CAPIX constraint has gone away from SAS modeling the hardware constraint has gone away from cloud modeling so to that extent you know I don't believe there are any other constraints that you know one can foresee as to why this digital transformation is not going to happen it's absolutely going to happen COVID only has accelerated it so what would have probably happened in next two three years is going to happen perhaps in one or two years in fact if I can quote perhaps Satya Nadella Mr. Satya Nadella in fact he said that even in Microsoft in last six months they have seen more adoption of you know digital tools than probably they had seen in the last two years so you know unfortunate event like COVID has just accelerated the journey which in any case would have you know happened and perhaps would have happened little later in the Okay thank you so much so you know you mentioned about Microsoft Mr. Nadella has said that you know adoption in the last six months or so has been much higher than COVID was so you know I'll just give you an example that you know there's a open activation company which is a tech based company but when you go down to real aggregation on ground they had put a lot of people on ground and they were collecting data from them manually and the reservations were done on manually so I just want to understand from both of you that you know even the tech companies were there let's forget about them than the smaller companies how much adoption have we seen grow in terms of the ground level collection of data or maybe services that are provided or onboarding of vendors and everything Actually I will request Mr. Gupta to go first because he'll have truly hands on information and then perhaps I'll follow him Sure, no problem. Akhil Akhil voice you have to unmute Is it better? Can I hear you? Can you hear me? Yeah, so we are a tech company with not many people on the ground at least on the new broker side but I can give you the perspective from the new brokerhood side where we have people on ground who go give the demo of our software to the management committees of the apartment and they onboard them so see as you rightly said some companies may not be doing it but there is no advantage of not doing it because when you have to do it manually on to the ground when people are not with you and you don't meet them on a daily basis because if you have operations in let's say pan India in 20 cities in India it's no way there's no possibility that you can meet them understand So software plays a critical role like even in terms of when exactly you start the day how many meetings have you done whether you have you are if you are speaking to any customers how exactly you speak what has the customer told the messaging platform what you are using what has been the feedback from the customer on the issue what you are looking into so it's extremely critical at no broker for the no brokerhood side of the business where we have the workforce on the ground who is selling the software we have such software which is in house built which we called Uniview which takes care of the complete Salesforce management along with the lead gen and all those things and we have seen phenomenal experience change both for the customers as well as within the organization where we are able to keep better track of what is happening how much time is it taking for a lead to get converted what are the problems our employees are facing on to the ground and how exactly we should be solving it and at the same time we get the almost real time feedback from the customers rather than somebody doing 8 or 10 meetings collecting that feedback sending it back to the headquarters of the office where you look into it now with the event of ML and AI where you are already looking into what exactly a person is doing you can get near real time feedback and fix the problem much earlier than what it could have been done without using technology for this so I probably go after Akhil so you know we need to separate weed from the chaff I guess that's something that we have seen in the market see what's happened today is everybody has gotten on to the bandwagon of AI ML and digitization I think these are all proxy words for things that they don't understand what they are talking about and that's I think it's natural at some point in time in the history of our commerce we talk about ISO, ISMS, Six Sigma I guess these are all marketing gimmicks or let's say it's one of their attempts to kind of impress the customer and capture the market but deep down if you go and really understand in fact at IPV we almost see what about on an average out of 10 about 6 to 7 businesses that are tech enabled and in fact when we do our due diligence we actually open the hood and do a deep, deep, deep due diligence so I can give you a quote and example I don't want to take the name of a company in fact recently you know we were doing a due diligence of a company that claimed to do you know use IoT to obviously lend credibility to you know form to fork basically tracing the you know the ingredients so to speak and when we actually dug deeper into their technology we realized that it's not an IoT it's exactly the point that you're making it is that they are you know creating the army of people who are capturing all the data and they are kind of putting a time stamp on the data and then they're saying oh this data is now IoT in fact there's no IoT because IoT means you need to have IoT literally to the entire value chain so now this is happening in the market but what is extremely important to understand is why do we need tech why do we need this tax transformation see the tech transformation brings three fundamental changes to your business first in the foremost it brings efficiency second thing is it increases your effectiveness of your business and third which is in many say in many ways then one function of the first two is it basically gives you scale at much lesser unit price so unit economics obviously will work for you very well because you can scale your business at much faster rate than you would otherwise would have done traditionally so the companies that claim to do tech and in the back end if they're not doing it it's a question of time before they're left behind there is no way if they have and this is an open market there would be another competitor who indeed is having solving the same business problem perhaps using really the technology in its full informant shape he will be light years ahead of non traditional entrepreneur who claims to do tech but is not doing tech so I think it's a question of creative destruction in the market sooner or later such entrepreneurs whether it's established one and new ones who don't really do tech they will just fall apart and fall by side so it's a natural cleansing process I would say you know I'm sure that you're right that you know eventually they will fall off it's just that for the timing that they're in the market people who kind of go to use those services burn their fingers and you know lose a lot of money so for a Lehman like a person on the street how does he understand the claims that are made by a company whether they are actually true or not that they have all these like you said that you know they were saying that there is an IMT but it was actually people on the ground and then they have time stamp on those data so as a Lehman how do I understand how do I know it I have no way to really recognize it and I will probably you know pay for a service for that sure no it's certainly that's a challenge that will obviously be there and perhaps we have to kind of you know go through the challenges where people claim that there is a high tech behind and there is no way a Lehman can really know that indeed there is a high tech behind or not but I guess what what is true is you know if you have let's say take for instance no broker.com I mean I'll take that example because he has given us a context what is the claim by no broker.com no broker.com basically says hey you know what we are a high tech company we are going to digitize all the intelligence around the business and we'll use the AL or MI algorithm to translate the business intelligence into you know insights and will obviously make the entire process pretty easy like he gave an example where a user app I can just go into the home I mean broker perhaps he will show the home if supposedly it appeals to me I close the transaction right now if you if you let's say you know you have another vendor who probably is not as tech savvy as no broker.com he makes all this claim but it's not going to deliver so maybe the first few set of customers obviously will fall for it because of pricing difference or marketing strategy whatever it is but over the course of let's say reasonable one year or maybe 12 years sorry one year or two years customers understand you know I think customers are really smart very smart people you know they don't need to be educated they will measure their experience they'll measure by the success of what the claims are being made and maybe they'll burn the fingers I mean there could be set of the customers will burn their fingers but I think customers you know are smart and especially what's happening today is because of social media you can't really hide your as much as you can't hide your you know happiness but the quality of service equally you can't hide your disappointment with the service and the social media is will be full of the disappointments and naturally they'll fall off to the point that I made earlier so it's it's it's experience over a period of time customer knows who is making a claim true claim and who is not making but yes there's still a challenge there it's a process of discovery when nobody comes to the certificate like ISO and say if they claim deep tech that means they have deep obviously there's no certification through the process of experience and discovery most of the customers will get it I mean I would I don't want to put a number out there but if I'm forced to intuitively say 80% of the customers can easily make sense out of it from their experience and say this is either true or this is BS so basically just to add to it when you use high tech whether you use simple tech MLA whatever is the most behind technology is that it brings the scale and it brings the speed so just to add to what others were saying the best way to know whether the claims are right or not to see how much time does it take and so let's say for example when no broker launch the rent payment services no quicker pay we used to settle payments in one to two days because we didn't have tech to settle but when you go to no broker pay it says if your transaction if your details are right agreement is right everything is correct the transaction the transaction settlement to the owner takes less than two minutes and that happens you can try it out yourself so as a customer as others were saying with the experience what they get they will certainly understand whether there is a high tech behind it or not or with the scale like when somebody puts photographs on no broker earlier when the owner was putting the picture on the no broker their property was taking anywhere between 12 hours to 24 hours to go live because there was a person sitting behind who was checking whether pictures are right or not now when you put it it happens in 15 minutes 30 minutes because you might be in queue but once your pictures are clear it goes live or else you get a message from no broker saying that the bus your pictures are not right hence we cannot make your distinct life so all these examples experience can very well let you understand whether it's a high tech okay so we have a couple of minutes so we I would want to understand one more thing that you know someone mentioned to me yesterday that you know as a layman when we when we go to you know take services from say anyone for that matter any other service provider and you know we are asked to allow something or maybe terms and conditions which is of 18 pages of you know text which which I have to read before I look for a number say for that and then what happens is that I am by patchered with you know a mover guy movers and packers guy and everything that comes with so how do we simplify this I mean I am an ordinary person I've come to you for service I just I'm looking for a house you know I just want a house I don't want anything else I'm a bachelor you know I have six friends who can carry my luggage and you know move me from one house to the other doesn't matter that I need a van or whatever so can you simplify that and you know that user experience is a is a place where can there be some see so it does happen and the the complex of processes the bigger will be the privacy policy in terms of conditions and all the same but at the same time need to understand that none of the business is there to cheat you right everybody is trying to help you and it takes time for everything something new which is coming up whether it's no block or any other platform it takes time even so had it been a perfect process then there was no need for innovation because it's an imperfect process there is innovation innovation takes its own time and there is a learning loop the feedback which even the company is taking and learning on top of it. So so at the same time can there be a shallow service behind what we are claiming no it should not be but at the same time one need to understand what has been the impact of that particular service on your life or how was it before and after using whatever service you have been using and are you really with with the social media you have the power correct and people lot of people get benefited out of it but at the same time companies get butchered just because you felt that the service what you get was not up to the mark or you felt ok that somebody who came to your house was he he just took out the mask to breathe and instead of telling was please wear the mask again it's for your safety and our safety taking the picture and putting on the twitter is not going to help so eventually it's it's it's a wherever human is involved there is a problem there is a possibility that there will be some kind of process deviation there will be some kind of misalignment to what has been told because every human behaves differently to a certain situation so it it becomes duty of both the brand and the consumer to understand what is happening and provide the right feedback back to the company so that they can also help in improving the service for them. Are there your thoughts on this? Sure sure perhaps you may need a minute to close the call so I would absolutely agree with you see at the end of the day entrepreneurs survive because they're solving a problem for them the entire the edifice of their businesses are they solving the problem is customer happy with the solution so quite naturally there all their efforts will be to say how can they reduce the friction how can they increase the transparency how can they increase the trust which means it's an iterative process you know there is no business problem that has a solution which is 100% from D1 over a period of time you gather customer you understand the customer behavior psyche needs better and you refine so your question do I need to sign a 16 page maybe not maybe over a period of time you realize that you know the 16 page can be reduced to 8 page or 4 page or perhaps there are other ways to get your your confirmation to what you're doing but the fact is that you still need a confirmation see that can not go away because that's part of the solution you know without that the solution will fall apart so so effectively what it means is you need it yes can it improve absolutely and any tech business no tech business including the Microsoft's of the world or Google's of the world has started off with the same level of service as they are today it's a more lower period of many years and that's the nature of the tech so you know it's an evolution and we just have deep time and the entrepreneurs understand it really very well and they're on top of it by the way they're like focused on customers like absolutely so I have to drop off I have a call starting sharp at 12 we have also run out of time we have to close it thank you so much Akhil and others for being here I would have loved to continue it was very interesting and as I see that digital transformation of course is a process and it's a journey which everyone has to undertake and it will take some time to be there thank you so much thank you thanks for having us thanks thank you thank you all our attendees and I would request you to join us on our next session that is on deep tech you can do it by you know changing the room on the left hand panel there will be rooms so you can change the room and go to our next session thank you so much