Biggest marketing transformation will be in data: Krishnan Chatterjee

New Delhi: The beauty of intelligent technologies is that they can take transactions away from human beings, Krishnan Chatterjee, CCO and Head of Marketing, SAP, tells Shubham Raheja in an interview during the Brand Studio Live. Edited excerpts:

How does SAP provide tailor-made solutions to every customer?

Traditionally, SAP was an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software company. Today, however, the vast majority of our revenue is coming from our cloud software solutions.

ERP runs at an industrial level—so the way a newspaper company uses ERP is very different from an FMCG company. Technology is fundamentally an application layer on top of which processes are run. So SAP has had a tremendous role in defining business processes industry by industry. Although we have half a million customers globally, the core business process runs on what was the erstwhile ERP, or the digital core.

On top of that, we start bearing other software—Success Factor for HR, the Hybrid Suite for CRM, front office, sales and marketing, Ariba for procurement and so on—but the core remains the business process.

Thanks to our core pivot, we are fundamentally designed at an industry level to be very close to the best business practices in the industry.

After that you have a services company like HCL, Infosys, TCS and Accenture that work to modulate the core application to fit the way your processes are.

How are intelligent technologies being applied to business processes?

The beauty of intelligent technologies is that they can take transactions away from human beings.

In the past, we have seen several telecom companies succeed in bringing people on-board at a scale of millions. This is possible because a telecom company does onboarding with KYC norms, much like a bank. If you’ve opened a bank account, you know how much time it takes, but this is done in the matter of milliseconds.

Along with this, once you start looking at the whole suite of intelligent technologies like AI, machine learning and blockchain, you realise that the transactional load is taken off human beings and in the future you’ll have to start looking at something called “augmented humanity”—much like Iron Man, in which the man in the suit is made far more effective by intelligent technology.

Using this, you can take any business process and fundamentally alter its clock speed.

Many other industries, mainly e-commerce, have used intelligent technology to create micro-transactions—the historical equivalent of which required nearly half a day to be spent while shopping.

So there’s an enormous saving in human productivity, transactions costs and an enormous capability in generating revenue. For the same capacity you are able to multiply revenue-bearing transactions by hundred-folds.

What is the future of technology in digital marketing?

Technology will never rest, but you have to understand which layer that technology attacks will be the most effective. The tech-stack comprises an upper layer or the experience layer, next you have an application layer, then a data layer and finally an infrastructure layer.