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Business News/ Technology / News/  Lot of digital transformation in the offing: CEO Publicis Sapient
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Lot of digital transformation in the offing: CEO Publicis Sapient

Many businesses will start to move from defending their positions to differentiating or disrupting
  • AI right now is about making sure we leverage existing data to drive refinements in automation
  • Nigel Vaz, CEO at Publicis SapientPremium
    Nigel Vaz, CEO at Publicis Sapient

    NEW DELHI: Digital transformation can be complex yet flexible enough to allow companies to choose their path and pace of transformation. While many are adopting digital technologies in bits and pieces, there are some companies which are re-imagining their whole business with digital technologies at the core.

    US based Publicis Sapient has been at the forefront of this transformation enabling many enterprises embrace digital technologies. In an interaction with Mint, Nigel Vaz, Global CEO, Publicis Sapient, talks about the importance of India for the company, the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in digitisation and why re-learning is important.

    Q. In what way is India important to Publicis Sapient’s business?

    Nigel Vaz: India partners with our businesses in Asia Pacific, North America and Europe. So it's always been very core to our strategy. We have a talent base here for strategy, consultancy, design and experience. A lot of data and AI-related core work is also based in India. So we have the full range of capabilities here. To get new talent, we have always partnered with the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) and IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) and lots of other schools like NIITs and some design institutes. India is by far the single largest talent market for us.

    Q. Industry executives often talk about the gulf in what the industry needs and the skills that are available?

    Nigel Vaz: This is not an India specific problem. You will hear this across the world because one of the fundamental challenges I think businesses are facing is the rate of change at which our businesses are evolving. It means that the educational system and the vocational system to develop and nurture young talent is not keeping pace. And even when they reform, it is once every five or 10 years. Meanwhile, changes in the industry are happening at a much quicker pace. So in effect, what you have is a linear education system competing with an agile business world.

    Q. What can be done to address this gulf?

    Nigel Vaz: Fundamentally, the entire model has basically been developed with the idea that you study for about a third of your life, you then work for a third of your life and then you retire based on how you do the first two for the last third of your life. And I think we're moving now into a continuous learning environment. So we try to encourage both talent we meet at colleges and also in the workforce to get folks to realize that we're in this continuous learning environment, and what the most important skill is not what you know, but the ability to learn, because you have to constantly learn and then unlearn and relearn.

    Q. India is important to Publicis Sapient from a talent point of view. Where does it stand in terms of market for the company?

    Nigel Vaz: We have had clients in India very specific industries and very specific contexts. But they are usually part of larger global companies in India as opposed to India as a market itself. Our primary focus has always been serving clients in the markets that we operate in as client markets and India was set up to be a talent market. The economics of running a business serving the Indian market would require us to adopt very different strategies from a pricing perspective.

    Q. What will be the big change expected in digital transformation space this year?

    Nigel Vaz: I think this year, many businesses will start to move from defending their existing position, which is where most transformations are focused right now to differentiating or disrupting. So if you think about them in stages, defend, is where we see a lot of activity right now. The next stage of that is the desire to differentiate and the third stage is to disrupt. And we are going to see a lot more activity in terms of differentiating and disrupting. The second big change we will see is that the companies are actually going to start focusing more on the economic value of what it is that they are leveraging from a transformation perspective. Right now most of the business cases have been focused more around driving more efficiency space. We are going to see more migration towards using digital transformation to drive growth.

    Q. What makes Publicis Sapient stand out from the competition?

    Nigel Vaz: There are lots of companies that are doing extraordinarily things in this space very broadly. But what we really specialise in doing is helping companies get really clear-headed about the implications of fundamentally transforming their business to become more relevant in the digital space. We distinguish ourselves by combining what is a very unique set of capabilities, real depth and strategy in consulting with really deep experience and deep engineering capabilities involving solution we have built using data and AI on an iterative basis.

    Q. How do you leverage AI and ML in your core business?

    Nigel Vaz: AI for us right now is about making sure we leverage existing data to drive refinements in automation. A big part of what we do is leveraging existing data that our clients have and broader data that we have access to, to constantly refine what it is that we're putting out there in an automated fashion. To give you an example, we are using AI and machine learning (ML), for a very large automotive company we are working with, to streamline the process of car design to reduce it from 18 months to a much smaller period by making predictive accurate models.


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    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Abhijit Ahaskar
    Abhijit writes on tech policy, gaming, security, AI, robotics, electronics and startups. He has been in the media industry for over 12 years.
    Catch all the Technology News and Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates & Live Business News.
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    Published: 11 Mar 2020, 04:13 PM IST
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