Industrial Automation Magazine India

Years worth of digital transformation is now being done in months

Published on : Sunday 01-11-2020

Sanjay Srivastava, Chief Digital Officer, Genpact.

From one of the largest BPO companies to AI-powered analytics – what was the rationale for the transformation?
All companies are tech companies, some just don’t know it yet. As we think about that world, anybody’s ability to add value changes over time. We were one of the founders, and now we are leaders in the BPO industry. We are taking our deep knowledge of process and domain, and encapsulating that in analytics and AI. This will allow companies to benefit in new and different ways and gain more insights into their business.

As companies deal with the pandemic and look to transform themselves, it is critical to redesign and transform their processes. In order to do that, they need the right foundation of data, the capability to drive analytical insights to drive business results and AI and automation to instrument these insights.

How does the Genpact Cora Platform help companies in their digital transformation journey?
As companies react to the new normal, they mostly need new capabilities and functionality to address the new requirements of the industry. The current and previous technology infrastructure was not designed for this. These large companies need a new business technology architecture, which allows them to leverage previous investments and add new innovation to address these new requirements. This new business technology architecture needs to provide integration capabilities, modularity, a governance framework, and be defined by experience as the true north.

Genpact Cora is Genpact's digital business platform that does this. It is designed to incorporate the best capabilities of partners in the ecosystem, but to do so in a manner that is modular, with composable services that become part of a greater end-to-end transformation.

The design principle behind Genpact Cora was to curate a set of automation, analytics and AI technologies that most global enterprises need for their digital transformation and deliver them through a modular, integrated and governed digital business platform – so that enterprises can future-proof their investments and make the most out of their legacy platforms. Digital transformation is about the journey, not the destination, and customers have said they really like the flexibility and governance offered by the Genpact Cora platform.

Genpact Cora has now grown to become Genpact’s IP around delivering domain-specific digital solutions to the market. This IP covers both services IP (frameworks, playbooks, benchmarks) and technology IP (accelerators, composable services) as well as IP built on top of partner technologies (e.g., AWS or Microsoft)

Is the Genpact Cora platform suitable for manufacturing and process industries?
Genpact Cora is the foundation for Genpact’s products and services, which are aimed at solving real business challenges in specific industries and functions. For manufacturing and process industries, we address challenges in predicting critical parts, giving visibility to supply chains, improving order management, enabling touchless invoice processing, managing liquidity, and so on. For SodaStream, a global manufacturing company, Genpact developed a cloud-based system to manage product quality and employee safety. Using Genpact's Cora SeQuence and Microsoft's Azure technology, we were able to build SodaFlow a system that gives managers the insights and analytical tools they need to create realistic benchmarks and KPIs – something that wasn't feasible with the previous system. It also provides a single source of truth for quality and control information across a global supply chain.

The Data Analytics segment at the moment has scarcity of skill sets. What is the Genpact experience?
Data analytics is now at the forefront of many digital transformation efforts across companies that we work with. Many companies have dark data, that when lit up, brings significant value. Analytics is the catalyst that allows us to harvest this value. But, to get that value you need the right talent. Our experience has been to invest in this talent in several ways. 

Genpact has one of the largest analytics workforces in the industries. That helps us because people like to work with like-minded peers. We believe that the world doesn’t need machine learning experts, it needs people who can apply machine learning to specific business problems, and we look for people who are ‘bilingual’, meaning that they can cross the boundaries between business and technology.

With Genome, Genpact’s internal learning framework, we are continuously preparing internally for the future of work by enabling our talent to acquire new skills and evolve quickly as industries and technologies change. Genome harnesses the collective intelligence of Genpact’s more than 90,000 employees. Genpact also announced Adapt and Rise, a role-based online learning platform, offering it for free for anyone who wants to acquire certain professional skills.

In the long term, how and where businesses attract, retain, and train top talent will change, and we believe that curiosity and continuous upskilling will become the new KPIs. 

The successful workforce of the future will bring a trainable and curious mindset. Workers shouldn’t fear AI or disruption but adopt a ‘trainable’ and continuously curious mindset to prepare for a future of constant skills development and retraining. This mindset not only embraces new opportunities and skill sets but seeks them out. 

Data always raises concerns about security and confidentiality. How are these issues addressed?
During this pandemic, we’re seeing increased attention on cybersecurity as companies address threats in a distributed workplace environment. This has also led to a renewed interest in using AI to combat security issues. 

AI can be a useful tool in helping companies address cybersecurity threats, yet at the same time can present additional challenges. For example, an attack may not only corrupt the application, it also can corrupt the data. You can have a safe algorithm but if you are looking at the wrong data, the results can be wrong.

In fact, in Genpact’s AI 360 research, 30% senior executives cite information security concerns as one of the top barriers to the adoption of AI-related technologies

The best approaches around this revolve around three key design principles: 
a. Build security into the core, which is to say that security isn’t something that you add to the end of a technology build process. It must be designed in from the start.
b. In addition, no matter how good the security foundation for security is, in the end it comes down to the human in the loop. Humans have access to more data than any point in history. As a result, the value of humanity to society, to employers, and to each other will be the judgement we bring to making decisions that machines cannot make on their own. 
c. Finally, security is a job that’s never done. It always is made better, and corporations must invest in and continually evolve their security measures because the world around us is ever changing. Think of security as a journey, not a destination.

In the world of data/analytics residency, security, privacy concerns:
i. Modern technology architecture allows us to separate the data layer from the logic layer from the compute layer. Pragmatic designs allow us to keep data in the right location but separate that from insights that we can extract and use more universally.
ii. We are unlocking new technical architectures to drive insights from data that is distributed and resides in secure locations. In Machine Learning, we adopt the federated model because data can often not be moved or shared. This allows us to tune a machine learning model on data sitting in different places and then give the benefit of data back to everyone. 

Three years after the transitions, how has the company progressed and how rapid is the scaling up?
Pre-pandemic, we had already transformed the bulk of operations to intelligent operations and built transformation services. Digital transformation journeys have accelerated significantly since the pandemic. Years’ worth of digital transformation is now being done in months.

Never waste a crisis. One of the things the pandemic has shown us is that digital transformation is no longer a ‘nice to have’, it’s a ‘must have’. The digital transformation choices that organisations make today as they move from offline to online will help them prepare for a future in which they will need to demonstrate a more holistic outlook, act more transparently and ethically, and deliver hyper personalised experiences. 

With our clients’ heightened focus on driving digital transformation, the last several months have demonstrated that our deep domain depth and process expertise as well as our investments in digital and analytics give us a competitive advantage.

We are taking a thoughtful approach to where and how we build IP [and where we don’t]. We have established a framework across services IP [including frameworks, playbooks and POV] and tech IP [reference architectures, domain data models, and business rules and data labels]. We are not building IP in areas where we can leverage hyperscalers and tech providers.

Our strategy of honing in on a specific set of chosen industry verticals and service lines, where we have deep domain and process expertise, coupled with our investments in digital and analytics capabilities, has positioned us very well to be that strategic transformation partner. As the market continues to evolve at speed, clients in every industry are focused on leveraging digital technologies and analytics to gain competitive advantage. We partner with them to realise sustainable business transformation for them. 

Post-Covid, automation and digitalisation appears to have received an impetus. Is this translating into opportunities?
Automation has received a big impetus because the distribution of work forces us to think about efficiency and optimisation differently. Digitisation has become big because the new normal has exposed the new capability that is required. Clients used to call call-centres for banks – now banks need new models to predict client interest.

There are several prevailing trends that are causing CXOs to expedite their five-year roadmap to digitise their operations. By pivoting quickly and creating more agility, their organisations will be well-positioned for growth in a post-pandemic world. These key trends include:
1. Cloud journeys are accelerating: Genpact is seeing a significant acceleration to the cloud during Covid-19 as an increasing number of executives experience the availability, resilience and performance of cloud-based applications like Microsoft Teams. As digital professionals plan ahead, it’s imperative they first review and refine their end-to-end business processes to operate at new levels of velocity, scalability, flexibility, and agility. Only then can they maximise the RoI of their cloud investments. Their planning must also take into consideration designing the new cloud infrastructure; migrating and re-platforming applications; and managing, maintaining and securing the cloud stack. 
2. AI and analytics are mainstream: AI and analytics in the enterprise are proven to unlock the collective intelligence of an entire network and enable organisations to shift from a reactive detect-and-respond paradigm to a proactive foresee-and-prevent model. As a result, analytics professionals have never been in as much demand. Executives working on fast-changing economic and business strategies are in need of more information, insights and predictions than ever before. Whether it’s revenue optimisation with commercial analytics modelling, business continuity across changing and distributed supply chains, enterprise performance risk across a fast evolving economic, credit and demand landscape, or customers expecting the companies they engage with to anticipate their needs and behaviours, the need for data-driven insights is clearly front and centre. As we plan for the rebound, this is a trend that will only accelerate.
3. AI requires ‘Humans in the Loop’: Humans have access to more data than any point in history. As a result, the value of humanity to society, to employers, and to each other will be the judgement we bring to making decisions that machines cannot make on their own. Al and data analytics can bring possible solutions to us at amazing speed, but ‘the last mile’, the actual decision, still belongs to humans only and is how enterprises can truly act with confidence. Genpact believes Al should stand for ‘augmented’ intelligence versus ‘artificial’ because the real value comes from humans and machines working together. 
4. End to end digitisation enables the shift from automation to autonomous: Enterprise processes are increasingly moving from automated to autonomous. The difference is in automating some components of a process to automating the entire process end to end. Genpact is seeing autonomous systems in many areas now, from data centre operations to online commerce, from IoT-enabled edge applications to fully autonomous enterprise processes like finance and accounting. However, to get to autonomous processes such as finance and accounting, organisations need to automate more of the complex decisioning and edge use cases which requires more AI, data, and intelligent automation.