 in the sense, we have a creative person on the panel. Not that you don't have business sense, I'm not saying that. We have a brand owner, and a business person, and we have a media and tech player, right? So a media owner, a brand owner, and a creative leader. So really they represent three different sides of the business, a part of the ecosystem. Let me start with Deepak. Deepak, there's a lot of talk of digital transformation of businesses, right? The usage of AR, VR, and I'm not talking communication. I'm talking in supply chain. I'm talking in research. I'm talking in communication. I'm talking in terms of crowdsourcing of ideas. Tell us what you're doing in Mondales to kind of be future ready for the next 10 years, 15 years. Hello, good evening everybody, and thanks, Amrak. This is a very, very big question. So let me start with a joke around this. So two years ago, we didn't know the D of digital, to be very honest. I went for one workshop with a consultant, and I got really shell shocked about seeing what things are happening there. So we said we must come and make a digital strategy. We drew up a page on strategy. After three months, we figured out it was outdated, we tore it apart. After six months, we realized we have version two, which also didn't work. Some in substance of it, what we realized is that it is about getting something out there. It is not about waiting for the very, very big idea to happen. And this is not something which will touch only digital marketing. It is not something that will touch only the front end. It touches your back end, like you said. So we just changed our thinking. We said, okay, instead of having a chief digital officer, why don't we have digital ambassadors? So all our leadership team said, at that time I didn't even know what's the full form of IoT. Yeah, so connected devices, okay, great. So I heard one of the gentlemen in... India on top. India on top, yeah, there you go. So I heard this famous quote. The amazing thing that I heard was this gentleman was the CEO for a white goods company. He said, you know, I have placed a camera in my fridge. It will not be, it will be very simple, not to do it, but having placed it, I don't know what it's gonna do for me. So we started in all places, and I think, you know, today where we are, we have something going in sales, something going in marketing, something going in our factories, something going in our supply chain, something going for our employees. Let me talk about what we did in the factory. So this entire thing about connected devices. So one of our factory street city, right now all equipments, all machines are digitally integrated. So the integrated digital factory. So we get on one console, every parameter of every machine. So instead of having 10 people manning one machine, there's one console which can man almost everything. This is how you get connected devices to like. The other big thing is pretty, learning. So we've got sensors in all these machines. We have a lot of data, we don't know what to do with it, but someday in life we'll tell us, if the pressure is so much, if the vibration is so much, the machine will fail. So we'll move from annual maintenance to a predictive maintenance kind of a mode. We still haven't moved, but at least we started a journey. And we don't even know how long it'll take. Version 2.0, maybe version 20.0 we'll get there. Likewise in sales, we have 600,000 villages. How do you know which one to sell to? But then you can be smart, like using the open stock architecture, like Uber or Ola use. There's GPS, there's a Google map, there's big data out there. You can figure out from the maps so how many villages have a metal road, how many electrified. So there's so much that you can do out there. So I think we're touching every field. There's not one function today, which I can say has been laggard in our department. But we haven't cracked it all. It's just a start. And when I met Mr. Mehta, and I talked to him at the marketing white book, and he talked about how fantastic HUL is doing and which it is doing. It shows in the confidence they have and the confidence the shareholders have. But he said, I said you haven't mentioned a word called Patanjali. Now I know since last year, the growth of Patanjali has peated out, relatively speaking. Now Patanjali is an example of a newcomer of an outsider who's playing by unconventional rules, who has advantages that other players don't have. We really work in this hookah world. Tell us two, three disruptions that you fear that may kind of take your business in a direction that you don't want it to. I mean, if I knew, I would be solving for it. But honestly, the disruptions are disruptions and they happen, right? So today, let me tell you what is the thing that we can learn from. So if a dollar share company happened, right? Of course. You can't say that there won't be a similar in the chocolate world, right? So we don't know what it's going to be. Chocolate for weight loss. Now, okay, that's... Okay, that's an instruction, brilliant. So now I think you need to join the team that we have. So what we have put out is a bunch of teams and senior leaderships, each of them with a mandate, saying that, listen, you are a disruptor, this is Halo, this is Winning in many India's and all those various kinds of stuff. So there's one team actually working, going out there saying, we don't know what to find, but we want to know who will disrupt and how. But what keeps you awake at night? You know, of course you think of sales numbers, you think of your three-year, five-year plan, you think of these, there's most CEOs, think of compliance, this has become very big. But what keeps you awake? That's one thing that keeps people clear of wake-up. Part of the fact is reading or answering mail or having conference calls. Yeah, since you called me a brand guy, so I think whose brand will it be? And this is something that has been bothering us for a while now. So if you look at what's happening, and there's a story that I told in one of the other meetings, I'm right where you were there, right? So nothing enters my house unless my wife knows the brand, correct? So only trust is what finds its way in. One day I saw her in the evening, she showed me a screen saying, what do you think about these shoes? I said, they look good, which brand is it? She said, how does it matter, it's sold on Amazon. That's a huge insight. The day a retailer's brand becomes the brand, because what they have delivered is trust, correct? So the one thing that I would really like to keep in my mind is this is my own wife, correct? And I'm sitting with her almost every day. So it sort of brings you to life, saying that you know, the reality check to say, listen, there could be a disruption like this. By the way, the anniversary issue of impact is the trust issue. Last year was the good luck issue. This year is the trust issue, and hopefully tomorrow I'll write my piece for impact. Coming to you, Prasoon, you know, since the time I entered this profession and for the last 18 years that I've been part of Exchange for Media, been talking of Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood coming together. So let's say you are Hollywood, you look like Guy from Hollywood. He is Madison Avenue because he's talking of brand, and he's clearly Silicon Valley. Tell me, is it really manifesting when you create communication, you create ad, do you create ads still for TV? I know Rajan's company is a digital company, but it still advertises a lot on television. You know, almost every player in digital advertises a lot on television. So tell us, you now make ads for digital, you make ads for television. And how is this real convergence of Silicon Valley, Madison Avenue, Hollywood happening in India? I must tell you, Anurag Kashyap, sorry, Patra. It's even. I should give it back. No, you know, making a commercial has got nothing to do with whether you're doing it for digital or not. So making a commercial is a painting. You could paint on canvas, you could paint on a wall, you could paint on paper. When a lot of people come to us and say, are you making a digital commercial? And I tell them, you know, I can't understand the question. So a lot of stuff that I do, it is the same commercial that is playing on television, that is playing in a movie hall. Which is your favorite medium? No, I think it's a question of who am I talking to? So that will decide which is my favorite medium. Now there are certain opportunities in each medium. And so if I knew that a client of mine is going only digital, then I know only digital has a certain encatchment. Yeah, and it has its own opportunity, its own pitfalls also, you know. So there's a screen size, you know, if I'm doing it actually for cinema, I'm actually utilizing, you know, six point, you know, whatever sound, okay? I'm not doing that to your, you know, to whatever is going digital. I'm also aware of the screen size and stuff like that. But these are minor, you know, issues. The main issue is, how do I grab the audience? And that's a creative issue. So that is where we are involved really only with the painting, you know. You just need, you know, so what will happen is if you tell me I want it on a canvas, I will make certain adjustments, you know. I'll get a different kind of oil for it. But that is an aorta of what we do. Okay, let me take you back to a conversation I had with Piyush 10 years back, he was at an event like this, and there was a talk about market research and Piyush said, you know, market research is fine. But I talk to people, I go to villages, I talk to the consumer. Fine was a very kind word he used, you know, normally he uses. Yeah, I mean, I know, I remember what he said, but he kind of trashed it and said, that's for people who don't know what's happening in the market. But today you have data, and data doesn't lie. And friends, there are companies that can predict elections, there are companies that can predict the sales of a company, they can predict almost anything. And second is, Deepak talked about this, know and phenomena, you know. You know, how's it playing on your mind? How do you factor that when you create that pain thing? Okay, there are two parts to this. On research, I too have very scant respect for it, okay. Because I do not know, not just in India, since you use that example, not just in India, world over, you tell me one election prediction which got it absolutely right. Arvind Kejral won't be the next Prime Minister of India, I promise you, I know that. So that, you're not doing a data research, your heart tells you what is happening, okay. You, if you are sharp enough, I think, I genuinely believe, and they'll beat me up for it, okay, immediately after this chat, I genuinely believe. I'm not going to. Most of research is basically stuff material to cover your backside if you have no gut feeling. So you will get promoted in life, you will get promoted any which way, even if your campaign fails as long as you can say, I researched it and it worked well, okay. So nobody's going to demote you. So you've lost your gut, you know. What is it that you believe in? If you go with gut and your belief will come, if you roam around in the market, if you see what people are doing, most of the work that we do is observations of life. You know, I know how my mother reacts to what, I know how my sister reacts to what, and I'm watching that. And in fact, what I'm watching is also being depicted in my commercials. Data. It'll ensure that you don't lose your job, you know. But typically- You're being cynical, but can you talk to lots of people in the private equity business? You know, the best commercials that we've done, and a lot of my clients ask me, how can we do Fevicol kind of work, okay. Now, I'll tell you Fevicol, the way it is done, we are sitting in Puse in Madhukar Parek, who owns Fevicol, and I and I are sitting in Jodhpur on a vacation and having some vodka in between Puse gets an idea. I said, that's brilliant. And Madhukar Parek says- I've never had vodka in my life. No wonder I've not had vodka in my life. And Madhukar Parek says, let's make it, and we make it. Okay, that's how I call it. Between three people, you know what is going to work, okay. You're not saying, let me research it, I'll ask 15 people, I'll ask 10 people. You know, if you've researched, and that's not a new thing that I'm saying, when I used to be in Lintas, you know, 20 years back, I wrote a script and then they researched it for about a year, a year later, they came to me, they said, now we can release it. And I said, now why do you want to release it? Let's write something new, because in one year, you've gone personally and shown it to the entire bloody country. They've already seen it, but they haven't shown it yet. So we'll come back to you on this human versus technology. Rajan, while you went to MIT, you work with technology companies, you work with Dell, you work with Microsoft, you do a fair amount of angel investment across sectors. You see lots of business plans, you see lots of ideas, you see lots of entrepreneurs, apart from seeing the data from what Google throws up. Tell us three predictions for the future. Rajan and Nandan's three predictions for the future. Three predictions for the future. Well, if I could really get them right, I wouldn't be here. You got some of them right, that's where you're at. No, I mean, I don't know actually. Look, I think, let me maybe focus on technology, because that's sort of what I tend to focus on. I think the first is AI and machine learning will actually impact every industry and everything that we do. Give us an example. Last week, Alphabet, which is Google's holding company, launched the world's first driverless taxi service. So in one city in the US now, you can pretty much order your taxi and it'll show up without a driver. So what's going on there is it's the first true application of artificial intelligence and really things like sensors and IoT and so on and so forth to an entire industry where this is a fundamentally different kind of car because this car pretty much drives itself. You don't need a human. And it actually goes back to what can machines do better than humans? See, so far, machines actually, as of today, right, December 7th, 2018, machines now can actually do a lot of things better than humans. One thing we're still quite a ways away from is what he does really well, which is creativity. And if you think about the act of driving, you don't need to be a creative genius to drive. So what the machine has done over a period of years, millions of miles of driving is machine has learned how to drive, machine can recognize, computer vision can recognize a cat from a dog, computer vision can actually recognize that's a child that's about to cross the street. So that's just in the auto industry. And you can go through industry after industry. So we do think that AI and machine learning will dramatically impact industries. And eventually, we don't know whether it's five or 10 years from now. Today, by the way, you know, you can listen to music. It's not mainstream yet, but the music may actually have been composed by a machine. That's done. Right now, the best composers are still composing music that's much better than machines can, because in many ways it's still a creative view. So that's, I think that's the first thing. I think the second one really is genomics and gene therapy. I think you open by saying you'd like to be like him. I think we're a few years away. Actually, that's a solvable problem. Maybe like Anurag Kashyap now. No, but you can certainly, you know, like, I don't know whether you all read, but the first gene-edited baby was born in China, right? So maybe Anurag, maybe the two of you won't look alike, but theoretically in a few years, if you really wanted to, you could make a baby that kind of looked like him and acted like him with his voice. And actually, maybe you could get his voice. I don't know about the rest of the, you know, because it's real. That's very disappointing. No, I know, I know, but, you know, but maybe you like the self, you just want his voice, right? We could gene-edit your voice. So I think that's another big thing, right? So I think life sciences will go a long way. And by the way, just coming back to machines, today computers can actually, so you know, there's technologies that have been built where just by looking at your retina, you can predict, the machine can predict whether you're going to get diabetes or not. Today, the machine can do that better than any ophthalmologist in the world, right? Because of millions of pattern recognition, you see all the little changes and boom, you're going to actually get diabetes. So that's just an example. So I think- For example, there are companies using AI to predict the, if there's no natural disaster, to predict the age of a person because they look at the, you know, position, they look at body markers, they look at past data, so they can, with a lot of accuracy, and that is being used to calculate insurance premium. So AI is getting used in ways that it wasn't used earlier. Yeah, absolutely. So I think, so life sciences I think will be, will be a massive change, right? And I think the third one really is as, and there's a huge debate going on with this, right? What happens 10 or 15 years from now? As technology is able to produce more food than the world needs, as technology dramatically brings the cost of energy down and so on and so forth, right? What do people do? And with all this free time that they have, will we be able to really free up the world, right? And I think you're going to start seeing new kinds of, you know, what I call social models developing in the world, which none of us can really predict today. I mean, there are different points of view of how this could evolve. But you know, the way we think about life today, I think is going to pretty dramatically change, and that third one really is a confluence of everything, right? So today the reality is, there's a Kleiner Perkins funded company that makes burgers out of vegetables that taste better than burgers. Wow, that's cool, right? For those of you that, you know, for whatever sort of reasons, don't really want to- I don't eat burgers, okay? Let me tell you that. No, I know. I mean, I think- Isn't it banned here anyway? I mean, is it banned in this state? I don't know, is it banned in this state? I don't know. There are some states that have banned it anyway, so you can't have it. But hey, guess what? Now you can. Because actually it's made out of vegetables, right? So you know, like everything is changing, and it's changing at a accelerated pace. You know, Rajan, we love Google, we love the tech companies because they're really making things happen that weren't possible, and there are lots of positive things there. But let me take a technology insider, a technology leader, a technology entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. He recently said, and he talked about social media. He said, Facebook is the new cigarette. It's killing people. He talked about social media's impact on children, on society, on relationships, on health, on focus, and then there are concerns about technology players using data. What do you have to say? Because you're at a seat where you see what's happening, what's good, what's not good. How do you keep up with these challenges? And I'm not just talking about Google. I'm talking of there's this huge push to regulate big technology players in Europe, now in America. Tell us, what do you think about it? I don't work for Google, so... Yeah, no, I mean, look, I think, look, you know, at a very fundamental level, right? It's very important that we make sure that technology is used for good and improving mankind as opposed to not, right? I mean, and I think this is a very, very important discussion and debate, and I kind of break it down to a couple of different things, right? One, you mentioned privacy. How do you make sure that, you know, all your data is held private, right? So, and I think there's a huge responsibility on platforms like Google and others to make sure that we're keeping your data private, right? And if you just look at Google, our principle is you should control your data. I don't know how many of you know this because I'm surprised how few people know. You can actually go to my account at Google, you can go to, and pretty much you can, you know exactly what data Google has on you. The signups. You can go to, yeah, no, and actually, you can figure out all the data that Google has on you, and then if you decide, look, I don't want Google to have any of this data, you can just wipe it out. Or you can say, I wanna take this data from Google to some other platform, you can port it instantly, right? You can say, Google, I don't want you to collect these kinds of data. So being able to give users the ability to control their data is very, very important, right? Secondly, it's very important that platforms, right, take even more care not to actually use data in ways that they shouldn't be used, right? We've seen a whole set of examples over the last year or so, so that's one. I think second is tech, you know, there's a big movement now called tech for good, right? So if you look at the reality is there are segments of society, so take the highly connected young who are probably spending more time online, right? So for instance, there are a bunch of companies including Google where we are now actually really developing technology. So you should be able to say, look, after eight o'clock, I don't want notifications, right? Or if you, you know, you should have settings for your kids that says after eight o'clock, the network just shuts down or your connectivity shuts down, right? But again, it's up to you, but how do we make it super simple for parents to be able to moderate the online behavior of their children, right? So you'll see a lot more happening there. So for instance, you know, you might say, look, I'm most creative, actually, I'm probably creative all day, but you might say, look, I'm most creative between six p.m. and, you know, three a.m. Or whenever I'm having vodka. Yeah, whenever I'm having vodka, right? We have two p.m. How do I tell the machine that I don't want these sets of things? I don't want any phone calls, I don't want any notifications, I don't want, you know, et cetera, et cetera, right? So I think that's sort of the second big thing. And the third is, you know, there's a whole set of things around fake news and so on. And you know this, you know, social media is, you know, Google is not social media in sense, but it's big, it's bigger than anything else. What about people today? Media like yours, platforms, whatever, are being used to slander people, anonymous content being put. What are you doing to deal with that? You know, because today, if something shows up in Google search, it can impact somebody's job, it can impact somebody. And the source may be entirely malicious. And how do you make sure once it's gone, but it wasn't true? So how do you update that? Yeah, no, so I think look, you know, high quality content and not having content that's illegal content that, you know, fake content and so on and so forth. I think that's very, very important. Look, so we are doing a whole set of things, right? So about, I think in 2017, we had a whole set of issues on YouTube, for instance, advertisers were worried that their content was showing up against content that shouldn't be shown, you know, whether it's extremism, extremism and so on and so forth. So we've actually gone now, you know, massively what we're trying to do is use technology process and people, right? To flag content that is not desirable and we've got, you know, 20 classifications of type of content that is not desirable. We then let the machine sort of flag that content, then we have human reviewers. We actually have 10,000 people around the world that actually all they do is just review content, right? And the review content to just understand whether this is content that's not desirable, does it violate local laws, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a third thing, right? And the third one really is process. We're trying to make it much easier. Like, let's say you see some content, but you see some, you know, content on YouTube or you see a search result that you think is not accurate. We wanna make it easier for you to flag it and then build the infrastructure and capability within Google to be able to review it and so on and so forth. So those are the sets of things we're doing ourselves. But then we're also actually doing a lot of work to train journalists. So in India actually we are training 8,000 journalists on exactly this topic, right? How do you actually make sure that when you, you know, how do you write content that's good and then how do you actually use technology to, you know, we have an initiative called Google News Initiative. We've committed to invest $300 million in independent quality journalism, in training journalists and a whole bunch of other things. So it is a very, very important point. You know, you started with something that I wanna clarify. We are a technology company, not a media company. Because you do realize, we don't actually make media. So that's why Murdoch is selling. That's why Indian media owners are selling, right? Technology gets you higher valuation. Look, advertising is a revenue model, but it's actually a very important difference, right? We are a platform for content creators to reach the world, to give creators a voice. We have a revenue model called advertising. You also have a revenue model called cloud. Eventually we'll have revenue models around consumers paying for subscriptions. We'll have, you know, so those are all revenue models, but at the core of it we are a tech company and I wanna clarify that. Sure, tech company has valuations and tech company has a certain halo. I just wanna end this because we really wanna announce the impact person of the earth. But two questions and I want short answer. One, what would Rajan Anandan be doing three, five years from now? Would he still be at Google, or would he have, he would have turned in an entrepreneur? You made so much investment. I know you said it is your eighth year and every day you look forward to going. Look, I love what I do, right? I think in life it's very important to do what you really love. And I love technology and I love the idea of getting people online. And so one thing you can guarantee, not three or five years from now, 40 years from now, because I'm hoping, you know, gene therapy and all that kind of helps and works in our favor. I mean, 40 years from now, every single person's gonna be connected to the internet and every single thing is gonna be connected to the internet and I wanna be there. Fantastic. And if you had to choose the impact person of the earth from the other eight nominees, who would that be? I would choose all of them actually. I don't even know why you pick one. Why do you pick all of them? It's an old idea, you know? Just pick one. If you had to choose one, I know. I mean, I really want one. If exclude yourself and out of the other eight, who would you choose? Look, I don't think it's fair because I'm not, I don't know, I didn't, I don't know all the things. Are you standing for election? I pick Deepak. I pick Deepak. Okay. Deepak, what would Deepak Ayer be doing three to five years from now? I wish I would be in a beach with nothing to do but then unfortunately we still have to work for our bread and butter. So, as we call it, chocolate is my bread and butter right now. 17 years I sold Pepsi. Two and a half years I sold Wrigley chewing gum and some good candies. Two and a half years I'm selling this amazing chocolate called Cadbury's. So all the three things I like, I'm sure it's going to be a thing that I like. That's exactly what I do, selling moments of joy, right? So that's what you would like to do, create moments of joy. Fantastic. And if you had to choose the impact person of the earth, who would that be a partner with? Rajan. Prasoon, we'll get these two questions for you. What would you be doing three years from now? I'd be creating. Babies or reverse? No, no, so I'd be, if I'm not doing films, I'd be creating something, you know? Because that's what we do. Sure. And who would be your choice for the impact person of the earth? Deepak and I struck a deal, so Deepak. Okay. Clearly it's the client always at the last laugh out of three, two votes for Deepak, one vote for Rajan and no votes for Prasoon Joshi. So on this note, I want to end this and really, maybe Mr. Gaye, I want to be like you when I grow up. We'll figure this out in a while. But please give our impact person of the earth nominees a big round of applause. Thank you so much. That was good fun.